I bought the cheapest laptop on Amazon - here are 3 reasons why you really shouldn't do that

I bought the cheapest laptop on Amazon - here are 3 reasons why you really shouldn't do that Features It's certainly compact, but this laptop was heavier than you'd expect for something so small and basic.(Image credit: Future) At one point, the laptop sat stuck on this screen, unresponsive, for almost five minutes.(Image credit: Future) The touchpad is acceptable (though not particularly responsive to soft touches), but the keyboard is decidedly poor.(Image credit: Future) The port selection is poor, but inexplicably includes a Mini HDMI port, which I haven't seen on a laptop in years.(Image credit: Future) Christian Guyton published Avoid at all costs As any savvy online shopper will tell you, it's wise to be a bit selective about your purchases, especially when it comes to tech. It's like choosing a bottle of wine in a restaurant; the absolute cheapest option often isn't really the best value for money. But with sites like Amazon and AliExpress awash with ultra-cheap laptops, it's hard not to be tempted at times - especially with the current RAM crisis threatening to increase the prices of both desktop and laptop PCs in 2026. Sure, it seems unlikely that these budget machines could threaten any of the , but they can’t be best laptops that bad, right? This was the question I set out to answer, cheekily procuring a whopping £90 (around $100) of discretionary budget from the TechRadar coffers to waste - sorry, spend - on the cheapest laptop I could find at Amazon UK. The price has gone up since, but the prices, pictures, and even brand names of these Chinese-made laptops can fluctuate on a frequent basis if you track Amazon closely. Cheaping out At the time, before the Black Friday sales kicked off in November, the cheapest laptop was the Azeyou 11.6 Inch Laptop . I’m not entirely sure if that’s even the right product name, but that’s all the Amazon listing is giving you - along with a basic spec sheet, AI-generated (or at least badly AI-translated) marketing one-pager, and some very mixed reviews. It’s never a good sign when the majority of reviews are either 5 stars or 1 star. Before I get into the meat of why this thing is (unsurprisingly) not very good, one quick disclaimer. I was only looking for Windows laptops here, since it’s actually possible to spend very little on a Chromebook and still get reasonably good performance thanks to the resource-light nature of ChromeOS. Windows, on the other hand, is a far more powerful and versatile operating system , but takes a heavier toll on the system running it - which is why super-affordable Windows laptops can be hard to find. Unboxing my prize when it arrived after a lengthy two-week wait for shipping, I was initially hopeful. Granted, it didn’t look amazing, but the plastic casing and screen hinge felt a bit sturdier than I had been expecting, and the rose-gold finish looked quite nice. Unfortunately, my hopes were short-lived; here are...

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