received the unit in a timely manner.
picture 1, packaging. the unit did not arrive in its original packaging, which can be expected in refurbished units like this one. still, the box was sturdy with a few dents, but overall intact. upon opening, the unit was well-insulated with bubble-wrap, protecting the unit. however, upon removing the top layer of bubble-wrap, i found the unit upside down, i.e. its bottom facing up. this sent me in a panic to immediately get it out and upright, fearing damage to the internal components
pic 2, contents. i was pleasantly surprised to find an original HP keyboard and mouse included (compared to open box units in best buy and micro center). they are not of the highest quality for gaming, mind you, but these peripherals should be enough to get you started for office computing. however, the casing was damaged and the corner would not seat properly, despite my best efforts to adjust it. i am not sure whether this was present to begin with or if it was a consequence of the unit being packaged upside down along with rough transport. this prompted me to remove the lid and inspect the interior to see if anything else was damaged. upon physical inspection, all other components seemed intact
pic 3, diagnostics and status. fearing potential damage, i ran the BIOS diagnostics and was relieved to find that the CPU, memory, and SSD all passed. upon booting, i was surprised to find the OS upgraded to Win 11H instead of the advertised Win 10H (also pic 4). i am not yet ready to transition to Win 11 and was somewhat disappointed by this. i proceeded to check on the warranty status with fingers crossed using the SN found at the back panel, but, unfortunately, it was already beyond its coverage (no surprise here). one odd thing was that the SN pointed to a different HP product, an HP Pavilion DESKTOP instead of the expected HP Pavilion GAMING. upon research, i learned that both product lines used essentially the same components (MoBo, PSU, etc) with the only difference being the casing design, starting memory (12GB for the DESKTOP to be shared with the 5600G APU vs 8GB for GAMING but with a dedicated GPU)
pic 4, components and software. as previously mentioned, the OS had already been updated to Win 11 (which is not a bad thing, it is just not what i expected). apart from this, everything else checked out, i.e. Ryzen 5 5600G CPU, Radeon RX 5500 GPU, single channel 8GB DDR4 memory at 3200 MHz, and 256GB SSD
i have been running it for almost 4 weeks now, and it is, so far, performing as intended. i hope to update this post in another 8 weeks, if walmart allows it
