The HP Pavilion 14-b031us is a thin and light 14-inch laptop with a 0.8″ thin profile and weight of four pounds. For comparison, the standard Pavilion g4 14-incher is 1.4″ thick and weighs 4.8 lbs. On the negative side, the 14-b031us uses an ultra-low voltage Pentium processor with considerably lower performance than the full voltage Pentiums, has a 4-cell battery instead of a 6-cell unit, and doesn’t have an optical drive. The battery life is “up to 4 hours” according to the manufacturer.
The included CPU is the Intel Pentium 978. The PassMark benchmarks show that it is not only slower than the lowest-end full-voltage Pentium B950, but the full-voltage Celeron B820 as well. On the other side, this solution is better than various low-end AMD chips, computing performance-wise. Other core components are 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard disk.
In other aspects, the HP Pavilion 14-b031us doesn’t lag behind the standard-size laptops. It has all necessary ports the average user needs, such as HDMI, three USBs, and media card reader, with exception of VGA.
The laptop is made of black glossy plastics and has a chiclet-style keyboard.
It currently costs about $380.
HP Pavilion 14-b031us Specifications
- Display: 14″ 1366 x 768, BrightView (glossy)
- Processor: Intel Pentium 987 dual-core, 2MB cache, 1.5GHz
- Graphics: Intel HD integrated
- Memory: 4GB DDR3, 2 user-accessible RAM slots
- Storage: 320GB hard drive (5,400 rpm)
- Optical drive: no
- Webcam: 720p webcam
- Audio: Altec Lansing stereo speakers, Dolby Advanced Audio technology
- Network: Wireless-N, 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN, Bluetooth
- Input: isle keyboard, touchpad with multitouch gesture support
- Ports and Slots: 2 USB 3.0; 1 USB 2.0, 1 HDMI, multi-format digital card reader
- Battery: 4-cell 37WHr 2.55Ah Li-Ion, “up to 4 hours” battery life
- Dimensions: 0.8″ x 13.7″ x 9.4″
- Weight: 3.96 lbs
- OS: Windows 8
- Warranty: 1-year
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