I am the IT System administrator for the company I work for. One of my jobs is buying new PCs when needed. We use hp pro books exclusively for our office staff, they usually offer a good PC for a decent price and they seem to last what seems to be forever.
We originally purchased one of these with the exact same specs from CDW and after about a week it ran into many issues which I will cover below. Unfortunately the users in our company work on their PCs all day and simply returning it and waiting for a new one wasn’t an option. So we either had to purchase a new one set it up and then swap it out to send the other one back, hopefully this all happens before the return window closes, or try to find a fix. We decided to try to find a fix and got the product to be at least functional but not great.
Fast forward two months later and we were in need of another laptop. While we have an account with CDW, amazon had a much better price on this laptop so I purchased it from here. I figured the first one was simply a bad unit and we would have no issues. We have purchased many probooks and so far only had the one with issues. After being setup and given to the user it also developed the exact same issues within a week of use as the first one. Those issues were: failure to boot to Windows, system fan errors on start up, random crashes of applications, Wi-Fi that won’t connect until you reset the adapter, locking up requiring a hard reboot, system fan running at full speed every minute the pc was on, and extremely bad battery life.
Now both of these PCs were identical both have Intel core i5 processors, 8 gigs of ram, 500 GB hard drives, same video adapters, both running Windows 7 pro SP1 X64, etc. Our company still uses Windows 7 pro as it is required by some of the applications we run, but these PCs ship with that installed and come with a Windows 10 license as well if you would like to upgrade. I tried everything I could think of to get these things running correctly. Tested certain apps to make sure they weren’t the issue, upgraded all of the drivers and flashed a new BIOS HP had available on their site, opened one up and tested the voltage on the CMOS battery, and everything was checking out fine. As I stated we have purchased many probooks and even quite a few 450 G3 editions. These two were slightly different than the other G3s we had purchased though. They were the more bare bones model. No back lit keyboard, no fingerprint scanner, and they had HDD drives vs SSD drives. These were the only two G3 probooks we had in house that were the lower model.
After some time it just started to seem like I was dealing with unsupported hardware. When attempting to use one of these devices it felt like it was constantly fighting with Windows 7. So on that hunch I upgraded one of them to Windows 10 with the included disk and license. Immediately after the update every single issue was gone. Even the system fan was no longer running 100% at all times. So I did the same on the second PC and again all issues were gone. I can’t be sure if the initial OEM installed windows 7 was faulty on both of them or if possibly the boards and their drivers did not support Windows 7, but I expect the latter. To this day though, those two PCs run great no issues at all.
I gave two stars because it seems HP is shipping out some of the variations of the probook 450 G3 with hardware that may not be able to correctly run windows 7 while claiming it can. We have quite a few other 450 G3s that run it fine but they are the more feature rich versions. They all have the back lit keyboard, the finger print scanner, and SSD drives. Those were also purchased about 8 months before these two were.
My advice to you is if you want to run Windows 7 still, get one of the SSD models and avoid the ones with the HDD with all costs. If you want windows 10 go with the probook 450 G4 that came out more recently. It comes loaded with windows 10 and the one we have works great.