My First Laptop

6 April, 2025

After years of having to share with my brother in around 2017 I finally got my own laptop.

The HP Stream 14

Imagine there being some redish pinkish marker on the bezel since I was a fucking idiot and thought it would make it look better. I was like 9 okay leave me alone.

This is also known as the biggest piece of shit I have ever used. I got it from a Sams club for at least $200 burgers. It could have been more I am not sure since it was awhile ago.

Info

Specs

• CPU: Intel Celeron N3060 (Not 100% sure on this one)
• GPU: Intel HD graphics 400
• 4GB of RAM
• 32 or 64GB of eMMC storage

The Keyboard

The keyboard isn't great. It feels very cheap and squishy but can be usable. My ThinkPad beats it out of the water. I have no idea how I was able to play rhythm games like FlashFlashRevolution and osu! on it.

The Track Pad

The track pad was a bit small and not very comfortable. It didn't help that I spilled milk on it once and it would sometimes freak out. I never liked track pads too much anyways and I always used a mouse with it.

Build Quality

It feels very plastic ally and it's fairly bendable. This feels like a piece of shit and for the price of $200 burgers you could get a decent used ThinkPad with better specs and for less money and that shit would last you forever or at least longer than this would.

When I opened it up It was mostly hallow and excluding the copper and fans it was around the size of a Raspberry Pi 5.

Repair-ability

Pretty much everything here is soldered on so if you break it good fucking luck. You can't upgrade the storage, ram, or really anything. The only thing I guess you could maybe replace is the screen and battery as that's the only thing that isn't stuck the the thing. What did I expect from HP anyway.

How I made it more usable

This thing could not handle running Windows well at all. This laptop is the reason I learned about Linux. I don't remember how I stumbled upon it but it was most likely from a SomeOrdinaryGamers video or another random Linux YouTuber. The video I watched at the time suggested to use Linux Mint.

I first tried Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment and I would randomly get freezes so I later on switched to Linux Mint XFCE which is a more lightweight desktop environment and everything worked fine from there.

Things I regret not doing

I wish I looked more into Linux during this time since there were so many more ways I could have improved performance such as

• Using a window manager (Like Sway) and not a desktop environment.
• Using a more light weight distro like Arch. I don't know if this would have improved performance that much but it would give me a little bit of storage.
• Using more lightweight alternatives to websites/applications like ripcord for Discord.

Total Improvement

Storage

Windows takes up a lot more space on a fresh install in comparison to any Linux distro. So Obviously it improved there a lot. I remember almost being out of storage on Windows since it already took up 25% but on Linux is was a bit better in that regard.

Gaming

The only games I remember playing on this are Minecraft, Old School RuneScape, and a (now shutdown) private server for OSRS called RuneWild.

Minecraft ran 10x better than Windows could ever dream of. I went from barely able to play to playable at usually consistent 30-60 FPS on modern versions of the game with only Optifine. I should have used better optimization mods like Sodium but even without it everything still was pretty smooth. I remember playing a lot of EarthMC and even had my own town at one point in Afghanistan. I did stop playing at some point and the country got abandoned and everything was mostly griefed.

RuneScape, especially on private servers, usually runs really good regardless of the OS so I didn't see any crazy improvement here. RuneLite did seem to run a little bit better though and RuneWild felt barely any difference.

My brother did try Terreria on this and it seemed to run really well even with a lot of mods. It looked to be at around a smooth 45-60 FPS. I should really get around to playing the game though.

I wish I did more emulation on this laptop but I have a few memories of emulating Game Boy Advanced with MGBA but obviously that will run on anything.

General Use

The XFCE desktop felt way snapper in comparison to Windows. On Windows animations would always be laggy (I had them disabled anyway for better performance) and took too long to open menus and applications.

In between 2019-2020 I did use a less shitty laptop from HP that my brother gave me when he got a PC, but it eventually started dying so I had to switch back to this laptop for a short moment. In 2021 I finally got my current laptop and that being a Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3. It isn't the greatest thing ever but I am happy with it.

Nowadays this laptop sits in my basement taken apart after I was bored. I don't think I plan to do anything with it for awhile.