It is big news for all those who can only spend $200 on a laptop, now have far better options than before. Although these machines are not manufactured for ■■■■■■■■ gaming or video editing, they are good enough for browsing web and writing papers.
In these days, laptops below $200 are commonly shipped with HD displays, Windows 10 with and a decent chunk of internal storage. Some of them also come with a free year of Microsoft Office 365 that is perfect for the students they are targeting.
To find out the best for this affordable lot, we put here the most popular models with a series of performance and display tests in our state of the art labs. After this they are put to the test, in order to get a feel for real world factors including keyboard feel, track pad responsiveness, and build in quality. At the end we can tell you surely if you want the best affordable laptops available today, these are the ones to buy.
The Asus E402SA
The Asus E402SA is also known as the EeeBook E402SA. It has 14 inch screen. With a display of 1366 x 768 pixels, it is glossy and looks great giving not a major drain on the battery. Its usual price is $249 MSRP which is a little above our target price, but it can be seen on sale as low as $179. E402SA has the same Intel Celeron N3050 processor as most of the best laptops below $200, but it is one of the few, offering both VGA and ethernet jacks. It provides a full size SD memory card slot with two USB ports. Its track pad is ordinary, but the full sized keyboard is comfortable to type on. The most favorite feature is the E402SA expandability; turning one screws to remove the bottom panel and can upgrade your storage with any 2.5 inch laptop hard drive or SSD.
Dell Inspiron 11 3000 (2016)
This Dell offers an attractive design with a hard build quality and a port selection to be expected from a new laptop in these days. Based on Intel’s Celeron N3050 dual-core processor, it performs much like any other laptop in its class. It also sports a decent track pad, but their keyboards feel is a bit cramped
The Inspiron 11 3000’s with price of $180, its biggest flaw is that it includes McAfee install, which can be a real hog on system resources and irritate with frequent popups. But above all Dell offers a package that is colorful, modern, and fast enough for school work or surfing the web. It may not be inspiring, but this is worth its asking price.
Lenovo Idea Pad 100s (Chromebook)
If you are shopping for a Chrome book, then the affordably price of Lenovo Idea Pad 100s that is $180 is pretty solid. Even though you would not be able to run Android apps, for only about $175, it is not too much distressing. It is more like the Windows based on Idea Pad 100s that we are testing for this article, but it has a somewhat better track pad and, it certainly, runs Google’s ChromeOS.
. Without spending more than $200, it is the right price for a simple Chromebook, including an Intel N2840 processor, 2 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage.