HP Pavilion 15-P235TX

Good value for money - not under specced – I purchased this product over two years ago for $750 from Dick Smith (before it collapsed) and am happily surprised it is still going. It is a little flimsy, the casing in particular is obviously made from cheaper materials and the screen resolution is only 1366 x 768 - which is what I thought would annoy me in the long run, but actually it makes sense not to have a better screen as you wouldn't be able to play modern games on the higher resolution setting anyway. I happily still use this for casual gaming, including the Witcher 3 and it runs very well on low detail.

I don't know if you can get these any more, but I have no regrets. The "viruses" the first reviewer is talking about is actually just a bunch of bloatware installed by HP. You can uninstall them quite easily. I tried using Windows 10 for a while, but I disliked the constant updating, so I reverted to Windows 8. I will use this machine until it dies or until Windows 8 is no longer supported in 2023.

Cheap and plenty of bugs & viruses – Got this when Dick Smith had a good price and the specification sounded really good. How wrong was I?!?! Very wrong! It came with Windows 8.1, and a bunch of useless apps that was slowing down the computer! Upon installing a virus protection in there, we found so many viruses my husband had to re-image the laptop and delete all the apps. Then came the next problem of installing iTunes, which took me 3 months and finally had to call HP for help. HP transferred us to nearly 4 technicians but no one can help us. My husband works in IT so he knows what these technicians are talking about, just saying we aren't IT illiterate! After 4 hours with HP help, their only solution was to re-image the laptop. Therefore I had to backup all my data and had to re-install all my programs afterwards! What a complete nightmare! To top it off, the screen image is totally awful! Even the colour on my old laptop was more clear and brighter than the HP laptop screen! There appears to be a 'haze' or 'fog' on my screen when I look at pictures, and I thought it was my eyes but it's not. We requested a refund from HP as the laptop does not live up to it's standard and clearly when I can't even install iTune. Do not even waste your money on this terrible laptop, because all you will get for less than $1,000 is a big headache!