HP Stream

The HP Stream 14 has a surprisingly generous 16GB of RAM, but it's wasted on a sluggish Celeron N4120 and a laughably small 64GB eMMC drive. The storage is the worst we've seen in our database. At $399, it's hard to recommend unless you absolutely need Windows and have almost no budget.

The Celeron N4120 sits near the bottom of our database for CPU performance, landing in the 13th percentile. That's rough. The 16GB of RAM helps with multitasking, but the processor will bottleneck you long before you run out of memory. The Intel UHD Graphics 600 is even worse, sitting at the 6th percentile. Don't even think about gaming. The 64GB eMMC storage is the real kicker though. It's dead last in our database at the 1st percentile. Windows 11 alone will eat a huge chunk of that, leaving you with barely enough room for a few apps and some documents. You'll be living off cloud storage and external drives.

Stacked against the competition, the Stream 14 doesn't stand a chance. The Apple MacBook Air M4 and Lenovo Slim 7 are in a completely different league, but they also cost way more. The real comparison is against other budget laptops and Chromebooks. The ASUS Zenbook UX3402VA-GH95 offers a vastly better screen and processor for not much more on sale. Even the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, while pricier, makes this thing look like a toy. If you're dead set on spending under $400, a Chromebook with a MediaTek or entry-level Ryzen chip will run circles around the Celeron N4120.

Pricing is all over the place. In the US you're looking at $399, which is honestly too much for what you get. In Japan, the spread is wild, ranging from ¥84,636 to ¥111,076 across three listings. If you're buying in Japan, hunt down the cheapest listing because the hardware is identical. The Canadian price of CAD 599 is even harder to justify. For this money, you're better off looking at a used ThinkPad or a Chromebook with better build quality and a faster processor.

The HP Stream 14 is a budget laptop that feels like it's trying to convince you it's more than it is. The listing throws around words like "seamless" and "elevate," but the specs tell a different story. You get a Celeron N4120, 16GB of RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. That RAM upgrade is nice, but it's bolted onto a processor that was slow when it launched years ago.

This is a renewed unit, which means someone opened it up, swapped in more RAM, and sent it back out. The 14-inch HD display is fine for basic tasks, but it's not bright or sharp by modern standards. At 1.47kg it's easy to carry around. Just don't expect it to do much beyond web browsing and document editing.

Skip this if you need to store anything locally. The 64GB eMMC drive will have you deleting files within weeks. Also skip it if you plan to run anything beyond a browser and Office apps. The Celeron N4120 will frustrate you with constant lag. And if you care about screen quality at all, look elsewhere. This HD panel is one of the dimmer, less accurate displays we've seen.

The HP Stream 14 is for one specific person: someone who needs a cheap Windows machine for light web browsing, email, and maybe some Word documents. Students on a tight budget might make it work, but the 64GB storage will become a headache fast. If you can stretch your budget by $100-200, you'll get dramatically better performance and a screen that doesn't make you squint.