HP Pavilion 17 Laptop AI PC, Core Ultra 5 225U, 8GB, 256GB SSD, Jet Black

A giant 17-inch screen for $320 is a steal, until you realize 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD are doing the heavy lifting. Great for basic work, terrible for multitaskers.

The Intel Core Ultra 5 225U is a 12-core chip that sits right around average for this class of machine. It'll handle web browsing, Office apps, and video calls without breaking a sweat. But that 8GB of DDR5 RAM is a real bottleneck. Open 30 browser tabs like the marketing suggests and you'll be watching that little spinning wheel more than you'd like. The 256GB SSD is also small by 2024 standards, and it lands in the bottom quarter of our database for storage. Boot times are fine, but you'll be uninstalling games and clearing downloads before long.

The Lenovo Yoga 7 gives you a better screen, more RAM, and a 2-in-1 design for a bit more cash. The ASUS Vivobook TP3407SA-DS74T is another strong alternative with a touchscreen and better port selection. And if you can swing the price, the Apple MacBook Pro MWP72LL/A is in a completely different league for performance and battery life. The Pavilion 17 wins on raw screen size per dollar, but it loses on almost everything else.

At $320, this is a lot of screen for the money. But you're paying for size, not speed or storage. If you need a big display for documents, email, and streaming, it's a solid deal. If you need to run demanding apps or store a lot of files, you'll outgrow this thing in a year.

The HP Pavilion 17 is a big-screen budget laptop that gets one thing very right: screen size. You get a 17.3-inch display for around $320, which is almost unheard of. But HP made some serious cuts to hit that price, and the 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD are the first things you'll feel. This is a laptop for someone who wants a huge screen for basic work and doesn't mind living with tight storage and memory.

If you're a student who needs to run multiple apps, a developer who wants to spin up virtual machines, or anyone who keeps a lot of files locally, this isn't it. Go get a Lenovo Yoga 7 or an ASUS Vivobook with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD instead. You'll thank yourself in six months.

Buy this if you want the biggest possible screen for the least possible money and your workload is basic. Skip it if you plan to keep more than a handful of apps open at once or store more than a few hundred gigabytes of files. The 8GB RAM ceiling is the dealbreaker for most people.