HP Elitebook Folio 14" 9480M, Core i5-4310U, 8GB, 180GB HDD, Silver

The HP EliteBook Folio 9480M is a refurbished 2014 business laptop with a slow HDD, a dim 1366x768 screen, and a CPU in the 4th percentile of our database. It's fine for basic office tasks if you can find it cheap, but the CAD 377-420 price range is hard to justify. Skip it unless your budget is extremely tight and your expectations are extremely low.

The i5-4310U sits at the 4th percentile for CPUs in our database, which is a polite way of saying it's one of the slowest chips we track. The 8GB of DDR3 helps keep a few browser tabs alive, but that 180GB 7200RPM HDD is the real bottleneck. Boot times will be measured in minutes, not seconds. The integrated Intel HD 4400 graphics technically rank high for GPU percentile, but that's a quirk of how integrated GPUs are categorized, not a sign of gaming ability. The gaming score of 14.8 out of 100 tells the real story. This thing struggles with HD video and basic multitasking, let alone anything demanding.

Stacked against the competition, the Folio 9480M is in a different universe. The Apple MacBook Pro M3 Pro and ASUS Zenbook UX3405CA are modern machines with SSDs, high-res displays, and processors that run circles around the i5-4310U. The Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 7 is the closest philosophical match, a business laptop, but it's newer, faster, and has a proper 1080p screen. Even the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro makes this HP look like a museum piece. The only reason to pick the Folio is if your budget is hard-capped around CAD 400 and you need something right now.

Pricing is all over the place in Canada, ranging from CAD 377 to CAD 420 across two Newegg listings. That's a CAD 43 spread for what is essentially the same refurbished machine. Even at the low end, you're paying over CAD 350 for a laptop with a spinning hard drive and a CPU from 2014. For that money, you can find newer refurbished ThinkPads or Dell Latitudes with SSDs and better screens. If you absolutely must buy this model, grab the cheaper listing and budget for an SSD upgrade immediately.

The HP EliteBook Folio 9480M is a refurbished business laptop from a decade ago, and it feels like it. You get a 14-inch 1366x768 display, a dual-core i5-4310U, 8GB of DDR3, and a spinning 180GB hard drive. This was a premium ultrabook in 2014. In our database, it's now a budget stopgap at best.

That said, it's not without charm. The keyboard is backlit, the build is solid, and Windows 10 Pro is already installed. If you need a cheap machine for email, documents, and light web browsing, it'll get you there. Just don't expect it to enjoy the trip.

Skip this if you need to run anything beyond a browser and Office apps. Students doing research with 20 tabs open will hate it. Anyone who edits photos, videos, or code should look elsewhere. And if you're buying a laptop for a non-technical family member, don't hand them a machine with a spinning hard drive and a 1366x768 screen in 2025. They'll think you hate them.

Buy this if you need a cheap, basic Windows laptop for light office work and you understand its limits. It's fine for email, word processing, and maybe a YouTube video or two. But if you plan to do anything more demanding, or if you value your time waiting for apps to load, save up a bit more and get something with an SSD and a 1080p screen. This is a stopgap, not a long-term daily driver.