HP 14 Laptop with Intel Celeron N4020 Review: Budget Basics and Limitations

If you’re eyeing the HP 14 Laptop with Intel Celeron N4020 !HP 14 Laptop because it’s sitting at the bottom of the budget barrel, take a deep breath before you pull the trigger. This is about as basic as laptops get in 2025, and it acts like it.

First off, yeah, it’s light and won’t break your back hustling from home to the library. The case isn’t going to impress anybody; it feels thin, flexes in your hands, and every so often creaks in a way that makes you wonder what’s holding it together. I wouldn’t toss it around unless you like hardware roulette. The keyboard is good enough for jotting down lecture notes or hammering out an email, but don’t expect comfort or consistent accuracy during long study sessions. And the trackpad? Sometimes temperamental—some days it’s fine, other times it just acts like it has better things to do.

Screen quality: it’s “okay” if your standards aren’t high. Just an HD display, nothing sharp or color-accurate, so good luck if you care about images actually looking alive. This isn’t the machine for photo work, and you aren’t going to be gaming either—forget about it. For streaming Netflix or YouTube, it’s passable, but squinting at washed-out colors is part of the deal.

Where it really shows its bargain bin roots is performance. The Intel Celeron N4020 is exactly as slow as you expect from hardware that’s been floating around in entry-level devices for years. On paper, 16GB of RAM sounds decent, but you’ll find the processor bottlenecking everything beyond really basic multitasking. Editing big files or running heavy programs is a lost cause. The 64GB eMMC storage? Laughably small, especially after Windows 11 eats its chunk. You’ll hit the storage ceiling faster than you think, especially if you try to install more than the essentials. Consider a cloud account or external storage non-negotiable if you pick this up.

On connectivity, it does enough. USB Type-A, Type-C, HDMI, and even Ethernet, so it’ll talk to most peripherals and plug into an extra monitor. But don’t expect blazing speeds—transfers and updates crawl at times, and with such limited storage, juggling files gets old fast. You do get a year of Microsoft 365, but after that, you’re on your own with subscriptions and the same low storage problem.

If you’re thinking this machine is good for coding practice, writing, web browsing, and maybe the occasional video, you’re right—sort of. Just keep your expectations grounded. Push it too hard, and you’ll hit lag and random slowdowns. Don’t even think about video editing, gaming, or running a bunch of apps at once; it’s not built for that, and it’ll remind you every time.

Now for the not-so-great part: reliability. Reports aren’t gentle—random shutdowns, sketchy keys, and more than a few horror stories about HP’s customer support ghosting after something goes wrong. If you have deadlines, don’t hang all your hopes on this machine. If it’s your only device, you’re rolling the dice. If you need to send it in for repair, patience is your new best friend.

End of the road: buy this only if you’re broke and need a basic laptop to get through a semester or two. It’ll open Google Docs and Zoom, do basic coding, and stream your usual distractions. But if you want a laptop you can depend on, one that’ll hold up to daily use and won’t stick you in a support nightmare? This isn’t it. Save more for something sturdier if you can. If you have to settle, back up your files religiously and buy some external storage off the bat—trust me, you’ll need it.