Things didn't get better in our next test, Maxon's Cinebench. It's a multi-core benchmark meant to exercise all of a processor's cores and threads—the more powerful the chip, the higher the score. Given that the HP Stream 14 is only equipped with a dual-core Celeron, expectations were low—and rightfully so. The HP Stream 14 didn't even break 550 points. Wireless connections include Bluetooth and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. The laptop doesn’t support Wi-Fi 6, but at this price we don’t expect it to. Over several days of testing, the Stream 11 easily stayed connected to my home wireless router without any dropped connections. (Photo: Molly Flores) Laptops typically need a score of at least 4,000 on this test to be considered excellent, so the Stream 11 is a long way off. Part of the deficiency here may be ascribed to the eMMC storage, whose performance is limited versus the more capable SSDs on more expensive laptops. HP Inc UK Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA FRN 973346) and acts as a credit intermediary and not a lender, offering credit products provided by a limited number of finance providers. Such credit products may not be suitable for everyone. Borrowing more than you can afford or paying late may negatively impact your financial status and ability to obtain credit.

Likewise, the Stream 11's CPU muscle is virtually non-existent as measured by the Cinebench test. Cinebench uses all available CPU cores and threads to render a complex 3D image. It’s the sort of task you’d probably never want to perform on the Stream 11 anyway. Between home, school, and work - your mobile life demands a PC that just doesn't quit. With up to 13 hours and 15 minutes of battery life, the HP Stream does everything your smartphone can't. Post, play, and stay productive all day with the familiarity of a Windows PC that's affordable, portable, and incredibly stylish. EXPRESSIVE DESIGN. Live your best life on-the-go and in style with a slim, expressive design. With its smooth finish and vertical brushed pattern, the HP Stream that perfectly fits your personality. MORE FEATURES. MORE VALUE. With Intel processors and up to 13 hours and 15 minutes of battery life, work all day or binge-watch your favourite shows - all while staying under budget. Plus, stay connected with fast Wi-Fi, plenty of storage options, and all the ports you need. WINDOWS YOU LOVE. OFFICE YOU NEED. Everything you love about Windows and more. Now, you're ready to do what you love confidently with improved performance and a user-friendly interface.Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University. We aren't able to get our 3DMark test to run on some extreme-budget laptops, but we were able to get our GFXBench 5.0 benchmark up and running on the HP Stream 14. The same couldn't be said for the other laptops in our comparison (thus we haven't charted those results here), but rest assured that the numbers were as ho-hum as you'd expect. Budget laptops equipped with integrated graphics chips have come a long way, but still can't really play games well, and definitely can't handle anything too graphics intensive. I've appeared on CBS News, in USA Today, and at many other outlets to offer analysis on breaking technology news.

What about video encoding? At this point, you might be able to guess, but the HP Stream 14 is not meant for this kind of work. To see how ill-equipped the machine is, we ran HandBrake 1.4, an open-source video transcoder for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. The HP Stream 14 was fighting for its life in this test, taking almost two hours to complete the benchmark. High-end laptops tend to do it in well under 10 minutes. Graphics TestsThe one test that didn't end in defeat for the HP Stream 14 was the display test. Using Datacolor's SpyderX Elite calibrator tools, we test every laptop's screen-brightness output levels at 50% and 100% brightness. We also measure gamut settings for the three most relevant color spaces for laptop users: the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 standards. One more bit of maintenance is recommended, beyond upgrading to full Windows 10: bloatware cleaning. Plenty of preinstalled apps take up too much of the computer’s precious 57GB of available space, including Netflix, Dropbox, LastPass, and McAfee Antivirus. HP’s preinstalled configuration utility, myHP, also constantly sends notifications reminding you to install updates.Thankfully, all of it can and should be uninstalled. On the upside, the HP Stream 14 also comes with a one-year subscription to Microsoft 365, giving users access to Microsoft's suite of programs.