First a warning: this is not a gaming laptop. Sure, you can game, but if you're starting to look at back-to-school deals with gaming in mind, you should probably hold off on buying a laptop with serious polygonal push silicon. This is not the case.

But this HP Pavilion machine is a bargain with the latest 10th generation Intel architecture: an Intel Core i7 1065G7 (it's a 10nm Ice Lake chip), 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and the quirks that only Intel machines can offer. It has a great storage subsystem (512GB Intel SSD and 32GB Intel Optane memory).

All good so far. The chassis is a bit tasteless, but it will get the job done. What some will turn away from is the screen: the 15.6-inch display has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 (yeah, we checked, but it's still definitely 2020), but you can jump up to a 1080p IPS panel for an extra $130.

If you want to torture yourself, you'll be pleased to discover that you can "upgrade" to Nvidia MX250 graphics for just $70 for the 2GB version or $170 for the 4GB version (making it the most expensive 2GB of RAM in recent memory). This will not transform you into a portable gaming powerhouse, and we do not recommend such an upgrade (hey, focus on your schoolwork), but it is an option.

Overall, if you can deal with the display, this is a decent little laptop that checks a lot of the more important boxes (RAM, CPU, storage). It would also be able to play a game or two if you really needed to. Of course, there are cloud gaming platforms (GeForce Now and Google Stadia) that would be perfectly fine on this laptop.

There are many more laptops in HP's Back to School campaign, so it's worth looking around if you're looking for a new machine.