HP 15-r018dx Cheap & Simple Laptop with Core i3

The HP 15-r018dx is yet another inexpensive laptop model. It packs usual stuff such as a 15.6-inch 1366×768-pixel display and 4GB of RAM, but adds some extra conveniences such as a large 750GB hard drive. Also, the processor isn’t from the bottom of the market. The included i3-4010U offers decent everyday performance and is a nice upgrade over the widely adopted Celeron and Pentium CPUs in the budget-class laptops. It’s not a speed demon like the quad-core i7 chip we see in gaming laptops, but it will serve for home and office duties absolutely fine. The 15-r018dx is outfitted with a DVD burner, stereo speakers, and webcam. None of the important ports and slots is missing. The laptop has three USBs. One of them runs at fast 3.0 speed standard. For external monitors, HDTVs, and projectors, there are HDMI and VGA video ports. A multiformat reader is there to read memory cards from your camera and other devices. For getting you online, the HP has Wi-Fi wireless and Ethernet LAN wired connectors. A missing perk is Bluetooth.

The battery inside is a 3-cell unit. Unfortunately, we can not tell how long the battery life lasts since we have no info on that.

HP’s 15-r018dx has different design than the other HP consumer laptops. It’s probably one of the first model with the chassis as shown on the image above. Glossy surfaces got replaced with matte finish. Overall, the laptop has a clean design, without excess gimmicks. The keyboard has isle style keys, while the trackpad sports real click buttons instead of integrated in the surface. quite thin for a 15.6″ laptop. It measures 1″. The weight of 4.9 pounds is below average, too. It’s about 10 percent lighter.

This notebook is recommended for anyone looking for something simple and cheap. You won’t find touschscreen support on it nor dedicated graphics for gaming, but it can accomplish all your web, office, and multimedia tasks with ease and has a spacious hard drive as a strong point. If you want to experience touchscreen input on a similar laptop but don’t want to shell out too much cash, you can check out Toshiba’s C55T-B51009. It has almost identical specs with the 15-r018dx.