HP Pavilion 15-eg

The HP Pavilion 15-eg is one of the few HP laptops I don’t hate. In fact, parts I quite liked. It’s user serviceable, upgradable, made from good materials, and has a terrific keyboard and trackpad. It’s a little short on “features” considering its price range, but that said most people won’t miss a majority of those things, and if you can find this computer on sale, it’s a decent bargain.

Configured with:

• Intel i5-11th Gen
• 12GB DDR4 RAM (upgradable to 16GB)
• 512GB NVMe (no extra SATA slot, but upgradable to 1 or 2TB NVMe)
• Intel Xe Graphics
• 15.6″ FHD Touch Screen

Display

Not the best not the worst. It aliased a bit and didn’t get bright enough to compensate for the HUGE amounts of GLARE that you’ll get (super glossy?) – but it represented color pretty well, didn’t have a lot of backlight bleed, and was not fatiguing to look out for long periods.

Speakers

B&O and not good. No bass, choppy mids, but good treble. Fine for radio, voice, or podcasts, but you can skip the music or gaming with this one. You will need headphones for any kind of decent audio experience.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Some of the best around for this class of laptop. Keyboard is backlit, comfortable to type on, and accurate. Big keys. Complaint? Silver keycaps which are hard to see the letters on, and even harder if you have the backlight on in a lit room.

Trackpad, while not as big as an Apple trackpad, is still bigger than most, and is very accurate and has a good “click”.

Battery Life

HP claims 10 hours from this thing, but we couldn’t get a single test to go beyond much of 4 to 5 hours. I wouldn’t count on this if you need to be away from the plug for long periods of times.

Features

No Windows Hello fingerprint or camera. Built in webcam with shoddy quality. Bluetooth. Wifi 6. Backlight on the keyboard. Intel Optane (which speeds up your solid state drive a bit more).

I/O

Great I/O for this class of laptop.

• 1x USB-C
• 2x USB-SS
• 1x HDMI
• 1x Headphone Jack
• 1x Power Port

Who’s it for?

• Audio Editors
• Light Games (Minecraft, Roblox)
• General Productivity
• Non-Profits
• Accountants
• People who don’t need anything premium but are loyal to HP or can get a good deal

Should You get One?

This is for people needing a basic, no frills laptop, that are loyal to HP. I feel there are better offerings from other manufacturers and I still wouldn’t get one myself. But if you need something to do accounting work, class work, or general productivity, it’s a fine machine and should do well. You could also use this for audio processing if you’re into that kind of thing. It should be a fairly reliable laptop and is made of good materials – so yeah, I don’t have a problem recommending this one.