[Review] HP 17-BY105: It's not gonna rock your world but it's alright

 

Up to a couple of years ago, the amount of people in the world that owned a laptop was very high and rapidly increasing. The thing is, not everyone owned a laptop: just the people that either needed it in order to work, study, or design. In 2020, though, a worldwide pandemic has forced everyone to stay cooped up at home and adapt to the new conditions, regardless of the area that they work in. 

Now, owning a good personal computer in order to be able to work from home is not just a luxury in many households, but also a priority. So, it's only natural to assume that getting your money's worth when investing in a laptop has never been more important.

Today we'll take you through our review of the HP 17-BY105 laptop, one of HP's most recent launches this 2020. Going from the simple design and style, all the way through to the 8th generation i5 processor that it boasts, that makes it the perfect addition to someone who is starting a new work-from-home chapter in their lives.

Index

1. An underwhelming design
2. Let's talk performance
3. Who's it for?
4. Connectivity options
5. Closing arguments 

Design

For starters, you should know a bit more about the first thing that a user notices of any computer they buy: the exterior. The design of the HP 17-BY105 is rather plain, with a black matte exterior and a weight of 5.2 pounds, it can safely be said that it's on the heavy side for a portable model, though pretty common considering it's a 17-inch device.

Moving onto the display, we've got a 17.3-inch diagonal with a pretty basic 1600 by 900 pixel resolution and a backlit WLED Panel. It's worth pointing out that the WLED backlight comes with some advantages, that include a good color gradation, long life, more uniform brightness and it even makes it more environmentally friendly.

As expected on a laptop this size It has not only USB ports, but also an HDMI 1.4 port which, has proven to be a very convenient and often necessary feature of a portable computer. Whether you want to have a chill night watching Netflix, or you need to project a video for an important meeting, the HDMI outlet will prove itself handy in either one of those situations.

Speaking of ports, the HP 17-BY105 in review has a couple of USB 3.1 ports on the side as well as a standalone USB 2.0 port (most suitable for connecting an external mouse).

We often underestimate the importance of the USB ports, however, it's pretty important that our laptop comes with at least one USB 3.0 or above port as this upgraded version offers up to 10 times faster data transfer speeds than the previous generation.

So, if you appreciate those spy movie scenes where the main character has to copy the entirety of the contents of a villain's computer into one tiny hard drive, he better do it using the 3.1 version of the USB ports.

Performance: What should we expect?

The HP 17-BY105 laptop has an 8th generation Intel Core i5-8265U Quad-core CPU and works at a base clock speed of 1.6 GHz, managing to reach up to 3.9 GHz when the user needs its fullest performance.

The quad-core processor makes it a rather speedy computer and optimal for tasks such as home office, schoolwork, basic gaming platforms, image editing applications, and even research, but it may stay short for professional gamers. More so because of the lack of a dedicated graphics card than anything else.

Moving onto the memory, we've got 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, whilst the storage is quite generous considering we've got an SSD unit and not an HDD unit, with 256 GB of available space.

If you come from a laptop that boasts a hard drive, which is pretty likely if you haven't renewed your device in a few years, then you're definitely in for a treat, with the SSD making basically everything you do on the laptop go lightning fast.

The machine's 8 GB's DDR4 SDRAM makes it a great laptop for multitaskers hitting the sweet spot for most users since it can smoothly run multiple apps at the same time at considerable speed without collapsing. 

Who's it for?

The HP 17-BY105 is great for people that are looking for a good quality, mid-range, affordable laptop to use for their everyday life, and relatively unsophisticated tasks such as working from home, watching movies or even research. 

Specifically, this model is well suited for web browsing, editing documents, streaming movies as well as some light photo editing thanks to its Intel HD 620 Graphics chip.

Anything else I should know? What are the connectivity features?

It should be noted that while most people receive this particular model with Windows 10 Home, some users have reported to receiving it with Windows 10 Home in S Mode. This means that Windows can only work with authorized apps.

Logically, this won't work for a lot of people. Therefore if you where in the unlikely position to have this happen to you, you should know that it has a pretty easy fix. Specifically, a quick way to disable "S Mode" is to attempt to install Chrome, Windows will tell you it needs to disable S Mode in order to so and you simply accept and quickly get access to the standard edition of Windows 10 Home.

As far as connectivity is concerned, while we've already mentioned the inclusion of several ports, it should also be noted that this laptop also has an ethernet port for a wired internet connection as well as your standard SD card reader.

There's also your standard WiFi b/g/n connection as well as Bluetooth 4.2 in case you wanted to connect peripherals or perhaps an external speaker -which we would advise-. There's even a DVD reader, quite rare these days.

Wrap up: what's the verdict?

As we wrap up this review of the HP 17-BY105 we can say that as far as 17-inch laptops go, this model presents itself as a pretty good bargain. We appreciate the fact that it delivers a generous SSD unit, a powerful mid-range CPU as well as enough RAM to allow for power users to not feel left out. All in all, a great deal when you consider the price point as well as suitable for a wide array of users.