I’ve bought a bunch of HP notebooks over the past 10 years or so for my kids and myself and they have been quite serviceable. My adult daughter treats hers fairly brutally and mangles her machines but it’s not the machines fault.
However, history aside I was gratified that she had passed her classes last fall semester and got her a pricey touch screen “beats” notebook last yearin a fancy red color and paid more than I usually do for notebooks to have it customized online with top end screen, RAM, CPU options etc.
So anyway the drive died and she wanted to see if she could rescue her data before sending it in. Unlike past HPs there is now no drive door access to get to the drive easily, you have to dis-assemble the entire bottom of the damn notebook to get access to the drive. In doing this and carefully separating the bezels and keyboard cover to prevent damage which was a huge PITA to access the drive I was struck buy how cheaply and poorly finished the machine was on the interior. I’ve seen better quality plastic and better plastic parts molding on squirt guns.
Getting to the drive was dicey as well as you have to wrangle this delicate film data cable straddling the drive while pulling the drive out.
This was my last HP notebook. The build quality is not going in a good direction.