Ultra-cheap Windows Laptops

The world is a crazy place. On one side the price of everything is going up. On another you can get a workable Windows laptop for less than 80 pounds. It runs Windows 10 quite handily. I bought one earlier this month. It was originally sold as a “Minecraft machine” and came with a copy of Minecraft and a years subscription to Microsoft Office 365. If you want to buy that flavour for the bargain price of 159 pounds you can get it from Smyths toyshop here. If you can do without Minecraft or Office you can pick it up for the amazing figure of 80 pounds from here.

There are not new machines, they are “reconditioned”. I bought one as a first computer for number one granddaughter and I must admit I was tempted to hang onto it because it is so darned nice. With 4G of memory it runs Windows 10 quite speedily on its quad core Celeron N3450. The biggest weakness is the hard drive. It uses a 64G SD card as the main storage so you won’t have space to load a lot of stuff with only 28G available for your files. However, there is micro-SD slot if you want more storage and a couple of USB slots for connectivity.

If you are after a “disposable” machine that you wouldn’t mind if you dropped in the bath or left on the bus this would be perfect. I even like the Minecraft green colour of the case (it is also available in Minecraft blue) which I think will endear it to the intended user. It arrived speedily with Windows 10S pre-installed. If you look carefully you can tell it has been used a bit, but everything works just fine. The screen is bright but lacks a bit of contrast. The battery life is not great, but workable.

The only snag that I can see is that the processor in the Minecraft laptop I received is the Intel N3450 which doesn’t appear on the list of Windows 11 compatible processors and Windows Upgrade says that it can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. This is where things get a tiny bit confusing, the page for the Minecraft Geobook 140 on the Smyths site states that a Windows 11 upgrade is possible. This is because there are two versions of the Geobook 140 in circulation. One uses the Intel N3450 and the other uses the Intel N4020 (which is Windows 11 compatible). For my purposes Windows 10 is fine, so this is fine with me.

The amazing news is that the N4020 version of the Geobook 140 is available for even less money here. You can get it for only 70 pounds. In fact I’ve just bought one to take to emf.