In general the only things you can upgrade in a laptop are the RAM and storage... If the CPU and GPU aren't enough for what you're playing you're out of luck. More on reddit.com

Small repair shop here. I get alot of HP computers in my shop. these budget $249 laptops are “budget” for a reason. If you’re going into accounting get yourself a Lenovo think pad with at least an. i5 cpu 16GB ram, and 512gb- 1TB drive. Lenovo also has student pricing. If you have any questions feel free to dm! More on reddit.com

Unless you’re doing highly compute-intensive work (you would know if you were, and you aren’t), more RAM is always the correct choice. Unless you were talking i7 vs. i3 or a really low-end CPU, then maybe the i7 would be helpful since it has more cores and much higher clock speeds. The only difference between current-gen i5 and i7 is cache size and a tiny max clock speed advantage, neither of which will be noticeable in “general use” workloads. Get the RAM, especially since more and more laptops can’t be upgraded later. More on reddit.com

If you can add another 8gb ram stick then you should be fine. On the other side, the drawback without a dedicated GPU is you may not be playing with the same level of graphics on games since that is the only thing your GPU starts to kick in (based on the tasks you do). The change is not noticeable so you shouln't worry about it. If your tasks are render-heavy (anything that has to do with rendering tbh) then you may notice a "small" change. More on reddit.com