Where to Find the Best Laptops for Good Value?

BonzoBanana A quick look shows this is the older version of the CPU that blacklabrador has in his laptop. So his laptop is faster except for the GPU which has identical performance but its not a lot faster so performance should be similar for games and just marginally faster for other applications. So for just over £300 seems a very decent deal. As ever though for such a major purchase its worth spending some time to find the best deal.

I'm currently using a HP stream 11 laptop which was £49.99 plus £6 postage from cash converters. It has the Celeron N4120 processor and only 4GB of memory. I wanted a super compact laptop for carrying. It's only a 11" screen and has over 15hrs battery life. I have sacrificed performance for battery life and portability. I also have a 15.6" Ryzen laptop but that is 4x as heavy and the battery life is 3 hours if I'm lucky, less for gaming.

I'm certainly not carrying the Ryzen laptop around in my backpack.

PhilipMarc Has it still got the mechanical hard drive? You will probably get a serious speed increase with a SSD drive. Looking at the processor its about the same as my Celeron n4120 on this site. Mine being a slightly later chip compensates for being a slightly lower model in the line up. Some benchmarks faster and some slower.

nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-pentium-silver-n5000-vs-intel-celeron-n4120

However I only have 4GB and non-upgradable but the laptop has fast SSD storage built in and I use 8GB of that as virtual memory. The main reason I got it was the 16hrs battery life and super compact size though. It's only about 800g in weight I think so I can carry it anywhere and use it and not really think about its size or weight. It can go in the smaller main compartment of my backpack. I do have a Ryzen laptop as well with a 15.6" screen that has 20GB of memory but I can't really use it on the go as I get about 4hrs max out of it often much less.

BonzoBanana It does and it's probably much better with an SSD, but it being 1TB I'm fine with it.

At first when using this notebook I was starting to think about returning it, then I installed Windows 10 LTSC and everything went smoothly afterwards. Strangely, with Windows 10 Home it was sluggish (don't know why, surely the bloatware can't be blamed for it i.e. Windows Store/Edge/Cortana/etc) alone.

Not too long ago, I installed Windows 11 Pro with a debloated script on a 4GB RAM laptop and much as I tried to be open minded, 11 was still severely disappointing and so I installed my favorite OS on it too.

I'm good with 10 until 2029 and then what? Either 12 is actually good or I'll go with a Linux distro.

PhilipMarc I installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC on this laptop and its definitely faster but much to my annoyance the windows anti-malware program is still running in the background just like normal Windows 11 and 10 and its often taking up to about 300MB of memory and some serious computational time and all it really does is try to prevent pirate Microsoft products being installed on the system. Its definitely a little lighter on the system but nowhere near as fast or efficient as some of the special versions of Windows 10 and 11 that have been cut down to minimal installs. Unfortunately those versions are typically non-upgradeable. You might get 2 years out of them and would use third party firewall and anti-virus software as all the Microsoft stuff is removed. I think you can get a version of Windows 11 that runs on a 2GB computer that way. It feels like if you really want to maximise performance that is the way to go but then Windows will struggle to update itself. I was hoping the Windows LTSC version was a lot lighter in resources than it is. It's definitely an improvement though. The windows anti-malware program is one of the biggest cause for slowdowns on low cost entry level computers though. It's not quite such an issue for you with 8GB though I guess.

I've caught it below in an idle state as I'm not really running anything but Chrome but still its taking over 70MB of memory but this can go to something like 280MB very quickly and perhaps take 11% CPU resources. Even when you disable realtime Virus protection its always there. It would be so useful just to switch it off when running games etc.

BonzoBanana I've tried Windows 11 Pro debloated on a 4GB RAM laptop and it was sluggish, so I just couldn't use that for myself and if it were someone, he/she would complain it's too slow.

Interestingly, if you select English (World), the Microsoft Store remains "disabled" and that's certainly something I'm glad exists because I don't like using an app store on a Windows PC, it feels like Microsoft was copying iOS/Android (that Start Menu sure is "inspired" by it).

AnitaLogan That looks like a decent budget option. The processor is older but its a mid-range laptop chip I guess so ends up being faster or slower than more modern chips depending on task. The i5 6200U still performs decently. However being a 15W TDP chip means I guess battery life may be less.

BonzoBantana Like I said I am not computer savvy, the battery life is the best I have from a laptop.