HP Victus 15 (2022)

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a picture of my laptop, running KDE Plasma
A picture of my laptop, running Fedora 42.
screenshot of the KDE plasma desktop running on this laptop
A screenshot of fastfetch, running on the same laptop.
Status
Running (unfortunetly)
Use case:
pretty much the same as the main PC, excluding gaming.
Hardware Name
CPU Intel i5-12450H
GPU GTX 1650 (damn)
Motherboard some shitty motherboard that hp cooked up
Storage x1 512GB Samsung NVME drive
Case it’s a laptop
Operating System Fedora 42 KDE

I bought this laptop back in 2023, when I needed a better laptop for coding and stuff and the little HP Elitebook that I had back then wasn’t really cutting it (Visual Studio would peg the poor 5th gen Intel CPU to 100% every time I opened that IDE). So here comes the HP Victus 15, which is a gaming laptop that kinda sucks ass and I hate it, but it has decent performance and fast storage. I got it off Marketplace for 400 dollars which was a pretty good price at that time, and while the listing said it had a 3050, which was still a shitty GPU but it was workable, but then I realized that the GPU in reality was the far weaker GTX 1650. I think i got a slight discount for that, at least. At least the CPU was worth something, at least.

a picture of a laptop, having windows being reinstalled on it.
so fresh, so clean! I had to reinstall Windows on this, because the bloatware situation was so fucking bad (thank you, HP!)
a laptop's bios getting updated out of nowhere
this laptop would love to just update its BIOS out of nowhere. Kinda fun when you have to take out your laptop for notetaking and instead to booting into an OS, it boots into the fucking BIOS to update itself.

Returning back to the GPU, it is truly dogshit. There is no real two ways around it. It was bad back then and it is still bad nowadays, a waste of silicon, some may say. However it still manages to play some games fine, it plays Cities Skylines well enough (on Windows, lmao), which is the only game I really would play in public anyways. I don’t really play games on this laptop at all. RAM wise the laptop had 8 GB of RAM, which was not enough and on Windows 11 it would make the computer stutter and slow down. I eventually had to upgrade the RAM to a more usable 16 GB, and the upgrade procedure was a massive pain in the ass, to be honest. To access the RAM, you need to take out something like 12 screws, and then you have to pry the cover off, which is notably something that doesn’t feel great. Eventually you get the cover off, and now you have access to everything inside the computer. As to be expected, this laptop’s internals are ribbon cable galore.

Originally this laptop came with Windows 11 Home, and in classic HP fashion, it was bloated to hell, and had many other preinstalled apps that I never asked for. So I had to reinstall the OS to something else. Originally I tried Windows 10, but it had many missing drivers like for the trackpad. I also tried reinstalling Windows 11, and while that worked, it still sucked ass because it is W11. I eventually used 11 LTSC on the laptop, and that was fine, but I was starting to get sick at Windows, and I eventually got rid of it on this laptop. Nowadays the OS that this laptop runs is Fedora Linux 42, specifically the KDE Desktop edition. In my opinion, KDE Plasma on Fedora is probably the best implementation out there, at least in my limited experience. Unfortunately this laptop’s demons show up once again the moment you install any Linux operating system. I have battled sleep issues on this stupid thing for months and months and I think my solution was just fucking turning the thing off, since I can never really trust the laptop if it is sleeping, or if it decides to wake up inside my backpack and immediately decide to cook itself. I pretty much given up on trying to make sleep work consistently, but hey, it could always be worse.

a picture of a laptop black screen, with error messages after it tried to suspend itself.
For the longest time, trying to get suspend work on Linux on this laptop was a fucking pain. 0/10 would not recommend.

Ever since I bought it, I had this weird artifacting issue with the display. Sometimes the screen will glitch out, like an old analogue TV losing signal suddenly. I really didn’t know what was up, and HP’s support like always was fucking useless. I eventually found out that if I played a video in the background, the issue would never come back, and that is what I did for the longest time. I ran MemTest86 for fucking 7 hours to see if it was the RAM, but the RAM turned out fine. I would do long ass sessions of Cities Skylines to see if it was the dedicated GPU, and yet nothing out of the ordinary. I went back to Windows 10 again to see if the issue would show up, and that seemed to stop it, but as soon as I returned to W11, the issue will crop up yet again. I think the way it got fixed is that I was using this laptop on my bed, and when I finally got tired and went to sleep, I just left the laptop on the bed. The next morning, the laptop was on the floor, bottom side up. The laptop was fine, but I did notice that the glitching disappeared, and I think at this point it has been a whole fucking year since the floor laptop incident™ happened, and the issue has never shown up again ever.

picture of a laptop, with a glitched up screen.
This is a screenshot from a video i took of the issue. I would have these split-second glitches on the display, which would appear out of nowhere for some reason. After the laptop fell to the ground, this issue stopped showing up. I still don't know what exactly the problem was.

I really don’t know what happened for that to be fixed with a good ol’ percussive maintenance. Is it because there was some cable poorly connected, and that fall fixed that right up? Could it be the SSD not properly mounted somehow, and that fall made it set back into it’s place? I genuinely don’t know. I can’t in good conscious sell this laptop to someone else whenever I decide to upgrade to something else, because I worry that the issue will pop up the moment they start using it. Another issue that this laptop has that I fucking hate, is that the headphone jack can’t really hold anything in, and the slightest bump can cause your headphones to disconnect. It is really annoying.

To be honest, this laptop feels really disposable. The chassis flexes a lot (so much so that the trackpad clicks in if you bend the chassis the right way), the trackpad feels like shit, the keyboard kinda flexes and creeks while typing, the screen wobbles if you move the laptop slightly, and the hinges make me cringe seeing how little material HP used to connect them to the rest of the laptop. Honestly this laptop is a nightmare considering I could’ve gotten a far better experience on something like a Thinkpad, and I would probably gotten better Linux experience on that too. Ultimately, I feel that HP sucks at doing literally anything: they suck at making printers, they suck at making phones, they suck at making laptops, they suck at making literally anything. Every single thing that HP makes is made with the most mediocre quality, like even they don't expect anything to make to last more then a couple of years. It is very frustrating. This laptop is a great example: if I were to purchase this new back then, it would probably end up at 800 to 900 dollars. That is genuinely insane, especially for the specs this has (that GTX 1650 GPU sucks ass.).

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