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Brandon Daughenbaugh photo
France, Paris
1 Level
715 Review
28 Karma

Review on HP 2 1 Touch Screen Nightfall by Brandon Daughenbaugh

Revainrating 5 out of 5

You will be returned.

I bought three of these at Best B* during the 30% discount. Two for homeschooling my kids and one for me. Firstly the hardware is great, the Ryzen 4700U is a beast with a small processor, it has some of the best benchmarks I've seen running my app etc. The battery life while running is pretty decent considering that only the battery is 51Wh, the screen is pretty good, etc. And now for the bad, modern standby/hibernation/etc doesn't work properly. Opening the lid after a few hours usually results in a dead battery (in fact, the battery drains faster in "standby mode" than during use!). Sometimes this causes the keyboard/trackpad not to work. Sometimes it "wakes up" just because the power button is on and nothing else, it takes a long press on the power button to turn it off and then turn it back on. The last time I did this on my daughter's computer (after I sat down for dinner!) it refused to turn off. When she finally turned it off, it turned back on with a blinking code 5.3 indicating a BIOS/firmware error controller. This is all with the latest firmware/Win10 updates. I, on the other hand, tried running Linux on it, but it's pretty much the same story, and I wanted to disable modern standby and go back to the old ACPI/S3 standby, which actually works and saves as much power as possible. Except that HP has hidden this choice, as well as options for adding new boot items, dimming speed options, improving accuracy, SATA and PCIe controls, and a long list of other standard options in advanced menus that no one currently has a password for. White. Per. You can see these items in firmware updates simply by running the unix strings command on them. Tech support is useless and they want to direct people to their paid support options (starting at 1/10th the price of the machine). If possible, you can ask them to log in remotely and change the given settings. Except to be honest they don't refund anything if they break or can't fix the problem etc. More than 4 hours on the support hotline and nothing. But what do you expect from people who are probably close to minimum wage and work in support lines? Good luck talking to someone who can actually fix something you can't find an answer to with a google search.

Pros
  • Nice
Cons
  • Good but not great