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The Probook 455 G2 is an otherwise by-the-numbers budget laptop. We like the soft-touch, matt black lid which feels sturdy and looks stylish. The casing takes on a faux brushed metal-style around the keyboard which looks great, although the keyboard itself leaves a little to be desired. The keys are fairly slippery to the touch, and we occasionally missed a few keystrokes when typing for longer periods.
The touchpad has delightful physical buttons with plenty of travel, and the touchpad itself is for the most part very responsive. The only area where the touchpad requires improvement is scrolling. On its default setting, it's almost impossible to coerce the operating system into detecting the two-finger swipe gesture needed to scroll up or down. Crank up the sensitivity to the max and you'll get a much better, but still rather laggy, performance. It's this sort of frustrating touchpad that makes us long for the touchsticks you sometimes see on ThinkPads and some Toshiba laptops.
The laptop weighs 2.1kg and is fairly chunky at 22mm thick, so it’s not our first choice for working on the move regularly. At least the battery with like Hp Mini 311 battery, Hp Pavilion dm1 battery, Hp Pavilion dm2 battery, Hp Pavilion dm3 battery, Hp Pavilion dv6300 battery, Hp HSTNN-OB0L battery, Hp VG586AA battery, Hp ProBook 4510s battery, Hp NZ375AA battery, Hp HSTNN-IB89 battery, Hp HSTNN-1B1D battery, Hp HSTNN-1B52 batterylife is up to scratch if you do decide to travel with it – the battery lasted seven hours and 35 minutes in our light usage test.
On the left-hand side of the laptop are two USB3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port as well as HDMI and VGA connectors for attaching external displays. The right side, meanwhile, is mostly dedicated to the DVD drive but there's also room for a pair of USB2 connectors and a 3.5mm headset jack. There's also an SD card reader on the front edge.
The 15.6in screen has a cramped resolution of 1,366x768 which makes it a little tricky to work in multiple windows simultaneously, although using virtual desktops helps here. Text appears large and legible, at least. The screen has fairly narrow vertical viewing angles, so you'll need to adjust the screen angle carefully. Colours look dull and contrast isn't very high, but the screen does have a matt coating so it's well shielded from reflections caused by overhead lighting and sunlight. There's some backlight bleed on the bottom of the screen, but it's not hugely bothersome.
HP Probook 455 G2 Ubuntu: performance
The Probook 455 G2 is powered by a quad-core AMD A10-7300 running at 1.9GHz alongside 8GB of RAM. You'd expect reasonably sprightly performance from such a lightweight operating system, but we actually found the PC bogging down a little more often than we'd like. We suspect this is partly down to a sluggish 1TB hard disk, but it's still slightly disappointing. Web pages open with a bit of a stutter and programs take several seconds to load. Overall, though, performance is acceptable, if not stellar.
The HP Probook 455 G2 with Ubuntu is very affordable, but even without the expense of Windows it feels a little cheap and lacks polish in various places from the hardware to Ubuntu itself. It’s by no means bad, but unless you specifically need Linux then a good Chromebook would be a better value and better designed Windows alternative – as long as you’re happy to work exclusively in the cloud.