The screen will probably not be great, with muddy colors and not enough brightness. Terrible viewing angles are also common, so you may have to look dead-on just to see the screen properly. Expect a lower resolution screen that isn’t great to look at and doesn’t give you much scree “real estate”, even if it’s decent. Overall, the build quality is usually pretty bad, as manufacturers cut corners here to save money. Cheap laptops are generally made of plastic and they may creak and flex when you pick them up. The hinge may break after a year or two. The internal hardware will also give you problems. Expect slow CPUs that chug while handling modern software, the bare minimum of 2 GB of RAM for Windows 10, and certainly not much graphical power at all. This can make even web browsing feel like a slog. Some cheap laptops have eMMC storage, which is kind of like an SSD in that it’s solid-state storage—but, unlike an SSD, is very, very slow. It’s also probably very small, with 32GB of space being common. Windows 10 alone needs 20GB of storage.
With that little storage, there’s a good chance you’ll be shopping for a microSD card or USB drive just to have somewhere to put your files. If you don’t get stuck with slow, small eMMC storage, you may have the opposite problem. Your cheap laptop of choice may have a large mechanical hard drive, which will be very slow compared to the solid-state drive you’d find in a decent laptop. A solid-state drive is the best upgrade you can make to noticeably speed up your PC if you don’t have one, so avoiding solid-state storage comes at a serious performance cost. Other things you may not even think of may give you trouble, too. We hope you don’t want to use the webcam on a cheap laptop, as it will often be low quality and make you look terrible. The speakers may be atrocious, too. And that’s just the hardware.
We haven’t even gotten to the software on these computers. Ultimately, you’ll probably be frustrated with the laptop, miss out on a better laptop experience, and find yourself waiting for the laptop to slowly perform actions. You may end up buying peripherals to make up for things that don’t work like you want them to. In a year or two, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself wanting to replace the laptop because something broke or it’s just too slow. You can avoid this problem by spending a bit more money on a laptop. 200 laptop isn’t necessarily a good deal when you factor in what you’ll get. If you’re buying a Windows laptop, it’s probably because you actually need (or just want) Windows for some reason. Spending a few hundred more bucks to actually get a decent touchpad and keyboard, a more readable screen, hardware that won’t break in a year, speedier internals, and other goodies just makes a lot of sense. Everything is better, and your machine will probably last longer and hold up better than a cheap Windows laptop you have to replace every year or two.
You may even save money in the long run. 800 laptop you can keep around for a long time, We recommend you read some reviews before buying a laptop and don’t just jump at whatever is cheap or on sale. If a laptop is that cheap, beware—it probably has some problems, and there’s a good chance they’ll wear on you after a lot of time with the machine. Of course, a lot of this assumes you can afford more computer—and not everyone can. 1000 laptop, consider avoiding Windows laptops entirely—you have other options. If you need Windows, and you mostly use your computer at home, consider getting a desktop. You’ll get a much better computer for the same price, and you won’t have to fix or upgrade it nearly as often. If you need a laptop but don’t really need Windows, consider buying a Chromebook instead. Chrome OS needs less overhead than Windows, so you can buy a less powerful laptop for less money and still get by much better than on Windows. A cheap Chromebook still won’t feel like a premium product, but these web-browser-and-Android-apps machines often give much more bang for the buck than equivalent Windows systems.
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