HP Pro 290 G9 Intel® Core™ i5 i5-12400 8 GB DDR4-SDRAM 256 GB SSD Windows 11 Pro SFF PC Black

Product Overview

AI-generated summary

For £762 ex‑VAT, the HP Pro 290 G9 is the kind of “safe office box” you buy when you need something that just works for day-to-day work—Office, web apps, email, light admin tasks—and you don’t want to faff about. The i5 platform is a sensible baseline and the small‑form‑factor design makes it easier to tuck into desks or keep space tidy in a managed office setup. If you’re supplying standard user environments where IT cares more about reliability and easy provisioning than tinkering, this fits nicely.

That said, the value depends heavily on what your 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD means for your users. In 2026 office reality, 8 GB and a modest drive can feel tight once you’ve got browsers with multiple tabs, Teams/Zoom, and typical background tooling running—so I’d only recommend it if you’re comfortable budgeting for an upgrade path (RAM and storage) or keeping users on lean workflows. If you’ve got power users, data-heavy Excel, lots of concurrent browser tabs, or you’re trying to standardise for a “keep it 4–5 years without upgrades” scenario, I’d look at something with more headroom instead.