Netbooks never really went away—it's just that no one calls them netbooks anymore. The label became a byword for cheap, plasticky, slow, cramped little laptops that no one would make the mistake of buying twice, but these devices are still around. Sometimes they look like convertibles or even tablets with keyboard accessories, but companies that stopped making "netbooks" never stopped trying to make a device that could provide some facsimile of the Windows PC experience for two or three hundred bucks.

Specs at a glance: HP Stream 11 SCREEN 1366×768 at 11.6" (135 ppi) OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 64-bit CPU 2.16GHz (2.58Ghz Turbo) dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 RAM 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics HDD 32GB eMMC NETWORKING 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 PORTS 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI, SD card reader, headphone jack SIZE 11.81 x 8.1 x 0.78" (300mm x 205.7mm x 19.3mm) WEIGHT 2.74 lbs (1.25kg) BATTERY 3-cell 37Wh Li-polymer WARRANTY 1 year STARTING PRICE $199.99 OTHER PERKS 720p Webcam, Kensington lock slot

For a while these kinds of computers were being squeezed out mostly by tablets, but now Microsoft is making moves to counter another threat to its desktop hegemony: Chromebooks. Google's laptops need a reliable Internet connection of reasonable speed to accomplish pretty much anything, and they're still limited in what they can do. But there are plenty of them in Amazon's list of best-selling laptops at any given time, and they appear to be gaining traction within a few particular markets. They start right around $200, and almost all of them cost less than $400.

Microsoft has made a few changes to Windows' licensing to combat these laptops, just as it made changes to Windows XP's licensing in the late 2000s to counter those early Linux netbooks. Most prominently, a new "Windows 8.1 with Bing" SKU offers OEMs a price cut in exchange for the ability to change the default search engine. And that, along with cheap don't-call-it-an-Atom chips, is what is letting companies like HP build laptops like the 11-inch and 13-inch Stream laptops for $200 and $230, respectively.

Microsoft sent us the Stream 11 for testing—five years ago we would have called this thing a netbook, but those years of technological progress have drastically improved the performance of even the cheapest components. It definitely makes compromises to hit $200, but if you need a certain kind of computer and you find Chrome OS too limiting, it's an interesting little package.

Look and feel

Most laptops these days go with more neutral colors like black or grey, but the Stream 11 sticks out with its deep blue casing and the blue gradient on the palm rest (a magenta version is also available, but it appears to be rarer as of this writing, and you can’t get a 13-inch version of it). It’s colorful and playful without being too ostentatious, though it does make the laptop seem like it’s aimed more at younger users. A black option wouldn’t be out of place, but we don’t mind the way the blue version looks.

There’s a healthy amount of bezel surrounding the 1366×768 display, but that’s fine—you’ll be more annoyed by the matte LCD panel’s shallow vertical viewing angles, which make colors and contrast shift if you’re not looking at the screen head-on. The display doesn’t get particularly bright, which makes the laptop harder to use in direct sunlight, but this is something we’re used to in cheap laptops. HP isn’t moving the ball forward here. The backlight is nice and even, and it doesn’t bleed around the edges at least. The hinge is rock solid, and the display barely wobbles at all, even if you’re shaking the laptop specifically to see whether the display wobbles.

The Stream’s most pleasant surprise is just how solid the body feels. Most cheap laptops feel like they’ve got a lot of air on the inside—they’re made of this shiny, creaky plastic that looks nice in pictures or on a store shelf but doesn’t feel as good to touch or use. The Stream 11 is all plastic but impressively sturdy, with no flexing or creaking anywhere. The top and the bottom of the laptop use a matte texture that won’t easily pick up scuffs or fingerprints, which again stands in opposition to the cheap, easily damaged paint jobs on most budget laptops.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The laptop’s keyboard is also commendable. HP’s product page says it’s 97 percent full-size, a difference so small that most people won’t notice a difference. It’s got great travel for a chiclet keyboard and has a nice clicky feel without being too loud. Most Chromebooks, budget Windows laptops, and even some high-end Ultrabooks that we’ve used have included mushy, shallow keyboards that sometimes make frustrating layout decisions. But just as it did with last year’s Chromebook 11, HP has shown that it can still fit an outstanding keyboard into a budget system. The worst thing we can say about it is that we found the arrow key layout a bit annoying, since it uses full-height left and right arrow keys but half-height up and down arrow keys.

The trackpad isn't as good. It’s not awful by Windows laptop standards, but that’s a super-low bar to clear. Responsiveness and palm rejection generally aren’t problems, but we found that clicks would occasionally fail to register or register in the wrong place, or the trackpad would register a left-click as a right-click. Tap-to-click proved more accurate, if you don’t mind it. In any case, the experience is only OK.

Rounding out our input and output options is the bare minimum complement of ports—one USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, one full-size HDMI, a headphone jack, a full-size SD card slot, and a Kensington lock slot—and a 720p webcam suitable for Skyping even though its picture quality is on the dark and grainy side. The two bottom-mounted speakers get loud and actually don't sound too bad even when they're turned all the way up, but their positioning means they'll sound better on a hard flat surface rather than a soft one.

Software

The Stream runs a 64-bit version of Windows 8.1 with Bing, which for end users is exactly the same as vanilla Windows 8.1—this isn't like those old "Starter Edition" Windows SKUs. The only difference is that OEMs can get it for a little cheaper than regular Windows, they just can't change Internet Explorer's default search engine from Bing (end users can still change it to whatever they want, though).

There's plenty of preinstalled software here, most of it in the form of "Modern" apps that can be uninstalled via the Start screen. TripAdvisor, 7-Zip, McAfee, "HP Connected Drive," and "Music" and "Photo" apps, and a handful of others can be removed if you want without really diminishing the system's usefulness. 7.2GB of space is given over to a recovery partition—the Disk Management app won't let you delete this partition, but advanced users confident in their ability to reinstall Windows can delete it to regain that space if they want.

Out of the box the laptop has about 17.5GB of free space, but that quickly fills up once you install a few apps and take advantage of the one-year Microsoft Office subscription and 1TB of OneDrive space. It gets even tighter if you set up another file sync client like Dropbox (HP offers 25GB of Dropbox storage for six months with the laptop, more than could actually be synced to the local storage).

Finally, if you want a version that doesn't make you remove the junkware first, Microsoft sells a Signature Edition with a clean load of Windows and the same Office and OneDrive offers. We don't know whether its disk will be partitioned in the same way, but it's the way to go if you prefer not to deal with uninstalling McAfee and the like.

The Stream isn't a particularly strong performer, which is what we'll be talking about next. For people who just want to run productivity and media apps and (very) basic games, though, there's no denying that Windows 8.1 is more versatile than Chrome OS. It also comes with Windows' standard maintenance headaches, but for anyone who can't get away with just Chrome OS, the Stream is a natural choice. Install Chrome on it if you want, and you've basically got a Chromebook Plus.