this thread is stupid
you probably already know this but most laptops come with shit hard drives (5400rpm usually) and if they have ssds they are massively overpriced so your best bet as far as that is concerned is to just buy one separately and install it yourself (there's usually videos on youtube of people doing it provided its possible for your given model)
for around that price about a year ago i got an asus with a quad core i7 and dedicated gpu and decent display (15" @1080p) but the downside is that its mad heavy and the power supply/charging cable thing is a huge fucking brick
during thanksgiving break i played on it and though 60hz was a pain it got pretty good fps (i copied comanglia's config from my main desktop, got 100+fps pretty much all the time)
im sure you can find 14 inch or smaller ones with cpus (all that really matters for tf2 tbh) that will fit your needs
from my experience the most important things for having a good experience are just having an ssd and a fast cpu (128gb is fine for a school laptop unless he's downloading tons of music or dumping tons of media on it for some reason its not like a bunch of word docs will add up to 100gb)
someone else who knows what theyre talking about can probably elaborate on which current parts are best or on if you need a dual core or quad core or whatever (afaik tf2 isnt very well multithreaded but at the time i did a lot of video editing which benefits from that)