SUB £250 laptop

[Tom_nerd]

I wrote this and though that if anyone ever googles SUB-£250 laptop they will get some help by reading this:

 

(£250 is around $330)

 

 

 

In this document I have considered 4 different laptops including the one that you were looking at (the ASUS E203MA) and they all beat the other laptops in some way, be it CPU performance or ports or just general usability. So, let’s get on with the comparison. 

 

The first laptop is the DELL Inspiron 14 3482, the main standout in this laptop is that it is a quad core that boosts up to 2.7GHz which will chew through most tasks, it also comes with Intel UHD graphics 605, which are pretty good because as the name suggests they were designed for high resolution use which means that it performs very well at 768p which is the resolution of this monitor, it also comes with 4GB of DDR4 ram which is pretty nice and can also be upgraded in the future to up to 8GB of ram. Another standout feature is that it uses an SSD instead of EMMC storage which means that it is not just faster it is also more reliable. Another upside is that it is using windows 10 S which to be honest is not a great version of windows 10 but can be easily changed to windows 10 pro which is personally my favourite operating system, in just a few clicks. Although now for some downsides, it comes with killer (not a spelling mistake) networking which only goes up to 867MBps at the best of times and you could expect to get less than 500MBps most of the time. This is fine if all you are doing is web browsing, but if you want to transfer files over the network then it will be slow. Although another advantage is that it has super-fast boot times thanks to windows hello facial recognition, and the SSD. Although it does weight 1.79KG which is tied in first for the heaviest laptop in this document, although normally with a lot of weight comes a lot of battery life. However, this is an exception it only has 6 hours which may seem like a lot but after a while lithium-ion battery degradation it would be more like 2 hours. The ports are OK having 2x USB 3.1, 1x USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4, 3.5mm headphone jack and a SD card reader 

 

The next laptop is the ACER aspire 3 A314-21, this laptop is very similar to the previous laptop. The CPU is an exception to this however it has a AMD A6-9220e apart from the catchy name it is a pretty good performer because it may not have great specs with a dual core that only boosts up to 2.4GHz, it comes with some pretty good integrated graphics. The same as the previous laptop it has windows 10 S which as I mentioned earlier is not great unless you upgrade to windows 10 pro for free. It has 4GB of RAM clocked at 2133MHz which is slower than the DELL’s 2666MHz, but the performance lost is miniscule. Again, the screen is 768p at 14 inches. The Wi-Fi card is slightly better than last time with Intel Wi-Fi instead of killer, but it still has a 1x1 antenna. The ports are OK again with 1x USB 3.1, 2x USB 2.0, SD card reader, 3.5mm headphone jack, HDMI and a gigabit ethernet port. Although now for the main downside it has only 5.5 hours of battery life which as I mentioned earlier is not much when you consider what lithium-ion battery degradation will do, but it will also degrade much faster because it is using a 2-cell lithium ion instead of a 3-cell lithium ion. And weighs 1.8KG. It also has stereo microphones which is nice if audio quality is a big concern. 

 

The next one is the ASUS E203MA. This is a good performing laptop with a Intel Celeron Silver N4000 CPU which is a quad core that boost up to 2.6GHz which is tied to the best performer in this document, again it has 4GB of RAM. Although one dis-advantage is that it has 64GB of EMMC storage which is slow and un-reliable, but if boot time is not a big concern then this would not be an issue. The screen is again 768p with anti-glare. The ports are below average with 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, micro-SD card, HDMI, 3.5mm headphone jack. Now for some massive advantages, it is super light with only 1KG of weigh and has a battery that lasts up to 14 hours.  

 

The final laptop is the ACER CB314 which is a nice laptop, but its main downside is that it is using chrome OS which is very similar to windows in its core functionality and user interface, but some windows shortcuts won't work. But it does have advantages like having 12.5 hours of battery life. Also getting better performance because chrome OS uses less resources than windows 10 does. It also does not pester you constantly for windows update. Excluding the fact that it is chrome OS it is a nice laptop. It comes with 64GB of EMMC storage which as I have mentioned earlier is slow. It has a Pentium N4000 which I spoke about earlier. A big feature of this laptop is the very good-looking screen, it is a IPS 1080p screen which looks great, and is also already colour calibrated. It has 12.5 hours of battery life with a 3-cell lithium-ion battery it also weighs 1.5KG which is OK. The ports are “good” with 2x USB type-C, 2xUSB 3.1, 3.5mm headphone jack, micro-SD card reader although no dedicated video outputs you could just get a USB-C to HDMI/VGA converter. Although the main downside is that it uses chrome OS, which takes some time getting used to but it does have advantages, like the lower system overhead and that it cannot be infected by windows viruses. This laptop weighs 1.5KG 

 

In conclusion, you were right the ASUS E203MA is probably your best bet because of its superior performance and light weight design. Also, I would buy it from curry’s PC world because they offer the longest warranty support and is the cheapest. 

[PiberiusWilde]

TLDR

 

Most of those are crap, you be better of with used Lenovo Thinkpads. These are your option depending on price and availability on your country T440, T450, and X260