Review on HP 14-inch HD Laptop: Intel Celeron, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, Windows 10 S + 64GB MicroSD Card by Luis Jacob

I have 14-DQ0001DX - identical electronics, just in a different case (I have a matte black plastic tire tread with a cloth-like texture). I love it! Battery life is 10 to 14 hours depending on usage. Sometimes I forget where the charger is - accidental use takes almost a week between charges. I voided my warranty by opening mine. I've upped my performance by replacing the 4GB RAM with an 8GB Samsung 2666 mt/s LPDDR4 with a row of chips on each side instead of two (same specs as the 4GB card I pulled out). They only have one SODIMM slot. Intel clearly says the N4020 processor doesn't support more than 8GB and I tested this with a 16GB stick of the same spec - it won't boot. You lose 1.3GB of disk space when you increase it from 4GB to 8GB. Battery life can actually be improved: I went into the BIOS settings by pressing F10, went to the battery settings and turned on "Show Battery Life", so now my shows me how long my battery lasted in hours and minutes stops when I hover over it with the mouse pointer. Mouse pointer on the battery icon in the taskbar. at 53% my BIOS estimates I have 7 hours left as I write this review (moderately light load). I think if there's anything else, the reason the battery life could improve somewhat is because less time is spent flashing an eMMC drive. Swapping in the paging file because now I have more memory to store things. With 4GB of system memory, the APU N4020 shares 2GB of RAM with the GPU for graphics. With 8 GB of RAM, 4 GB are allowed for graphics. I tried a 3D game on the 8GB version of this laptop - the frame rate was so low that the screen refreshed only twice a second and the car I was driving left tire marks on the walls of buildings. Yes it will, but the frame rate makes even 8GB games a disaster. This thing is really good at cloning hard drives, programming Arduino boards, surfing the internet and playing idle games like solitaire. It works equally well with Excel and Access. The sound is not as good as the Samsung S5e, but better than the iPad. There is no way to upgrade the hard drive unless you buy a different motherboard. I opened mine and looked. There is no option to add a SATA drive as the connector was not soldered to the motherboard - there are dots but no connector. You will also need a drive cage, but there is a hard drive bay inside the case to install a hard drive/cage assembly if you have a socketed motherboard. Forget about adding an NVME disk. Yes, there's a screw stand, but there's no screw to attach it, and again, there's no connector on the motherboard. Yes, there is a place on the board to install an NVME connector, but there isn't... and NO... these things don't work in the Wi-Fi card slot, so forget about putting the Wi-Fi card through one Replacing NVME drive and using a USB Wi-Fi dongle - connector is incompatible and has different keys. In my opinion this laptop is perfect for email, social networking, web surfing (safe sites!), idle games like scrabble and more, even cloning other external hard drives and backing up flash drives. Microcontroller programming for this thing is a breeze, and the battery life is great! It's easy and comfortable to hold and balance for an hour after you've fallen into a hotel room bed out of town. And if you forgot to bring your charger, you still have the option to spend the weekend with your charge. I have a Samsung S5E, iPad, 17 inch gaming laptop with 32GB memory and this HP 14.-DQ is the best computer for home and travel. I don't recommend disabling S mode. Windows Defender pairs fairly well with the Microsoft Edge web browser. As long as you stick to the Microsoft App Store and don't travel through the red light district of the internet, and here's the gist: create a standard user account and work under it (don't log in as an administrator as Windows also uses you by default when setting up) , you should be reasonably sure. When you exit S mode, you will open to install third-party software. Then you need the best internet security software package. Then you're wasting disk space and CPU resources that you wouldn't lose if you were stuck in S mode. With 64GB on a drive with an N4020 Celeron processor, you want to conserve those resources. it's best to leave this thing "as is".