HP this morning rolled out a trio of notebook refreshes it's gearing towards students, particularly in price but also in design. The Pavilion dv6 is being given a headlining dv6z Artist Edition 2; the 16-inch notebook has special lid artwork that won a recent MTV design contest and also comes with relatively high specifications for an AMD-based system, including a 2.3GHz Turion X2 Ultra, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a Mobility Radeon HD 4650 for its video. It also gets a bundle of three Corel audiovisual editing apps and will launch on June 10th for $950.

The Intel-based dv6t also now starts at a relatively low $650 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and Intel's basic integrated video. HP makes it available immediately.

A change to the dv3t brings the 13.3-inch system to the same $650 price but with an LED-backlit display, a 2GHz Pentium dual-core and a 250GB hard drive as its differentiating factors. Again, this trim is available today.

Rounding out the updates is a planned price cut on the dv2z that drops it exactly $100, down to $600; when the update becomes available on June 10th, it will add the promised dual-core Athlon Neo processor option for much smoother performance as well as up to 500GB of disk space. HP also implies that dedicated graphics will be optional rather than standard to reach the price target.