Way back in the 90s, a program called SoftRAM claimed to double your memory without any additional hardware. It, uh, didn’t. (It basically just fooled the memory display and did nothing to improve performance.) I’m reminded of this flimflammery as HP laptops with “1.1TB” of storage pop up on Amazon and Newegg. The catch? 1TB of that is a OneDrive cloud storage trial, which ends after a year.
A Reddit poster documented several listings that showed “1.1 terabytes” of storage on budget HP Windows laptops. That’s 128GB of internal storage—a paltry amount even for a years-old $300 laptop—plus a one-year promotional subscription to Copilot/Microsoft 365 with 1TB of cloud storage. This is, obviously, not physical storage… and it’s a promotion that comes with lots of different Windows laptops.
After the promo ends, you’ll have to pay $100/year to keep it up. So, yes, I’d say any retail listing that refers to this as “1.1TB” of storage and implies it’s actually part of the physical product definitely feels like a scam.
I should point out that the listings included in the original Reddit post are not from HP itself. As VideoCardz notes, they’re all third-party sellers using Amazon’s market system. This is how all the big sites operate now, including Best Buy, Walmart, and Newegg, and a huge volume of products combined with a lack of oversight is letting more and more scummy practices flourish.
I’ve spotted similar listings on Walmart, but I do need to point out that a “1.1TB” listing on Newegg appears to be removed at the time of writing, so maybe somebody over there is paying attention.
Sketchy sellers aren’t anything new. But I get the feeling that this sort of practice might see an uptick as the RAM crisis extends and affordable laptops get increasingly hard to find. 128GB of storage is so low that just operating and updating Windows 11 will become a challenge before long, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a Windows laptop with less than 16GB of RAM at this point.
In one of these listings, the seller says the laptop has “up to 32GB of RAM” at the top of the page, despite the specs at the bottom claiming it has only 4GB installed. Gross.
Amazon
Be careful out there, especially if you’re looking for something affordable. I’ve reached out to Amazon’s press contact for a statement and will update this story if I get a reply.
