I grabbed this refurbished laptop cause mine broke and I'm pretty impressed. I mainly got it for the 8GB of memory, but it's CPU performs better in benchmark tests than other laptops you'll find for this price, both new and refurbished.The battery I got was defective so I gave it a 1 star on battery life, but the refurbisher has been great and is sending out a replacement.Right now I'm running a VM with Manjaro (a Linux distro) and it handles it like a champ. It's also acceptable for music production and small video editing jobs.Don't get this for gaming, it only has onboard graphics.Two years later edit: Returning to say it's still going strong! I stopped using it daily when I got my desktop but it's still my only laptop. So for traveling or not working at my house (gets old) I use this and it's great. Maybe I've been harsh on HP all these years, and the refurbisher did great!