HP Pavilion Sleekbook 14

Hey everyone,

Over this past black friday I bought a new HP sleekbook, 14in, core i5, 6GB ram from Sam's Club. To me it was a pretty good deal. However there is one thing I would love to do and that is ditch that 500GB HDD and put an SSD in there. However I can't seem to disassemble the darn thing! Can anyone of you guys help me or give me advice as to what I should do. It's the perfect fit to be a ultrabook, all it needs is that SSD i want. Get back to me on this...

Matt


Model Info: HP Pavilion 14-b017cl Sleekbook Laptop, Intel® Core™ i5-3317U, 6GB RAM, 500GB HD, 14"

trying to figure this out so I can buy an SSD over the Xmas holiday sales

 

Have you consulted the maintainance and service guide for your system?

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03590565.pdf

Look under Removal and Replacement Procedures->Component Replacement Procedures->Hard Drive.

 

I picked one of these up the other day for a crazy cheap price, and I was planning on doing the same thing as you. Chucking in my 128gb ssd and putting another stick of RAM in. I followed the guide from the post above and managed to get the keyboard off, but I got stuck at the top case. I went around the edges with a safe pry tool and it just wouldn't budge. I stopped because I thought I was going to break it, so I put the keyboard back on. The guide doesn't really give any decent instructions.

 

I can't help you with your problem but would you be able to give a very quick review of this laptop please? I haven't been able to find much info on it and I think it would be a good recommendation for a friend.

What's the build quality like? It looks a bit plasticy in the pictures.
How's the keyboard and touchpad?
Is the RAM easy to access? I might upgrade it to 8GB for her. Do you know what speed the RAM is clocked at?

Any other insight you can offer?

The European one seems to be updated with a 3rd gen i3 and a hybrid drive so I think it would be a pretty good deal for the price.

 

The thing I love most about this computer is that it's thin, looks great and cheap at the same time. The build quality is pretty decent, it's plastic but solid feeling. No creaks or anything, and the display hinge is good. I bought the red one and it looks great. I thought the black looked a bit too shiny and cheap.

I have the AMD version with the E-1800 chip, and performance is netbook-like. That's alright for me, because I don't do much more than browse the internet and watch movies. You might have better luck with the Intel version. 1080p video runs well with the AMD 'discrete-class' graphics, and I've been playing GTA SA on it nicely. Battery life is sub-par, I get about two hours. I called HP and complained that this wasn't anywhere near their advertised 'four hours', but they told me it was normal to get this kind of battery life. I'm not too sure what to think of that kind of customer service.

The keyboard took me a while to adapt to, but it's not bad compared to my MacBook's keyboard. The only thing I dislike about it is the strip of keys to the right of the backspace and enter keys that contains the keys 'home', 'pg up/down' and 'end'. I don't even know what these are supposed to be used for, but they can get very annoying if you accidentally hit one while typing. I really like the media keys on the top row. The trackpad has a nice texture on it which feels good on your fingers. It has multitouch support and works with all the new Windows 8 side-swipe gestures. As with the keyboard, I'm not missing much from my MacBook's trackpad (and Apple has wonderful trackpads).

I've had one attempt at getting to the RAM, and I must say that it's very well concealed. I managed to get the keyboard off, but I couldn't find any instructions to go from there. I'm going to try to open it up again to put in an SSD, so I'll post back here if I manage to do that.


Overall, I'm extremely pleased with this computer for the price I paid.

 

I've had one of these for several months now and recently upgraded the ram to 12gb (surprisingly it was able to accommodate both 4 and 8 gb sticks which was surprising because usually ram has to be parallel. Anyways, I found that the best way to remove the top casing is to slide a thin/medium guitar pick around the edge. I've removed the top 3 times this way and haven't broken any clips thus far (knock on wood). The guitar pick just sort of unhooks the clips without causing any problems. From here, in order to upgrade the ram you have to unplug the fan, power button, hdd, remove the wan module, and unscrew the hinge over the power port. then you can lift up the mother board and the ram is underneath! That's quite a few somewhat dangerous steps now that I am writing it out but it didn't seem too complex when I was doing it!

 

Hi there, I bought hp sleekbook 14 b120dx, and I also want to replace the HHD with SSD. The factory HDD is quite slow (5400 rpm), and slows down the whole laptop. So I was wondering what kind of SSD disks are supported? I found there are SSD 2.5" and micro SSD, and from the specifications this laptop has 2.5" slot, with SATA 3 connector. So I suppose standard 2.5" SSD with SATA 3 will do just right? I plan to get 128 GB, and any recommended online stores where I can buy one are welcome. Also it wold be great if someone could post pictures of the whole disassemble process.

 

The keyboard sucks. The spacebar repeats no matter what you do. And when I contacted HP about it they had me send it in, then sent it back saying they couldn't duplicate the problem. So I'm looking for a replacement because this is ridiculous.