I was going for a netbook before I saw this listing. I had a very specific using for this laptop as my main machine is an i7 32 gig of ram fast SSD and 6 TB of 7200 speed HDs.PRO's:i5 and 8 gig of memory is very good for a laptop in this price range.Screen while small is very sharpSSD is fast - Big Easter Egg here - it's really a 256 Gig SSD with an unallocated 128 Gig area. You can make that a phantom Drive (to late to add to "C" the way it is delivered giving you an extra 128 gig of storage.No screen problems or key problems or pad problems (wondering if some folks don't know you can turn the touch pad on and off). Download the technical manual from HP.USB 3.0 are very handy.Lot of quick external controlsGood battery life and second batteries are cheap here on amazon.If you have Office 365, sign in with your ID and machine is setup for you.Con's:Even using Diskpart I cannot get the machine to remove "read only" from the SD card slot, but its does read my cards and that is all I need for the current time.Even though it comes double boxed, the internal box had a huge gash in it, but laptop apparently is fine.Very small external scratches on one side, if you want "shinny new" you might not want one of these.My take on the refurb is that if you have a budget and you want a machine that will do most of what you want (it 1/5 the cost of my desktop) on a daily basis (including all programs in office, video watching, web surfing,  LR/Photoshop and even 1080P video processing (don't know if it could handle straight 4K but with Proxy editing to could, rendering would Ok to slow). Since my machine actually had a 256 SSD I am more than please as this laptop will be used to control some advance astronomy gear I think it was a great bargain for the price which was only about $30 more than a netbook with 32 gig of storage.