I bought the cheapest laptop on Amazon – here are 3 reasons why you really shouldn’t do that
As any savvy online shopper will tell you, it’s wise to be a little selective in your purchases, especially when it comes to technology. It’s like choosing a bottle of wine in a restaurant; the cheapest option is often not really the best value.
But with sites like Amazon and AliExpress full of ultra-cheap laptops, it’s sometimes hard not to be tempted – especially with the current RAM crisis threatens to increase the prices of desktop and laptop computers in 2026. Of course, it seems unlikely that these budget machines could threaten any of the best laptopsbut they can’t be that bad, right?
That’s the question I decided to answer, by brazenly grabbing a whopping £90 (around $100) of discretionary budget from TechRadar’s coffers to squander – sorry, spend – on the cheapest laptop I could find on Amazon UK. The price has since increased, but the prices, images, and even brand names of these Chinese-made laptops can fluctuate frequently if you follow Amazon closely.
Cheaper
Back then, before the Black Friday sales started in November, the cheapest laptop was the Azeyou 11.6 inch laptop. I’m not entirely sure that’s the right product name, but that’s all the Amazon listing gives you – along with a basic spec sheet, an AI-generated (or at least poorly AI-translated) marketing page, and some very mixed reviews. It’s never a good sign when the majority of reviews are either 5 stars or 1 star.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of why this thing is (unsurprisingly) not very good, a quick disclaimer. I was only looking Windows Laptops here, because it’s actually possible to spend very little on a Chromebook and still get reasonably good performance thanks to the low-resource nature of ChromeOS. Windows, on the other hand, is a much more powerful and versatile operating system, but it places a greater burden on the system running it – which is why very affordable Windows laptops can be hard to find.
Unboxing my prize when it arrived after a long two-week wait for shipping, I was initially hopeful. Granted, it didn’t look amazing, but the plastic case and screen hinge seemed a bit more sturdy than I expected, and the rose gold finish looked quite nice. Unfortunately, my hopes were short-lived; Here are the top three reasons why I strongly advise against spending your own money (or your employer’s money) on a laptop like this.
It’s just slow
As soon as I started the Azeyou, we got off to a bad start. The Windows 11 setup process, which should take maybe 20 minutes on an average modern laptop, took four hours and ten minutes. Even once in, things didn’t load quickly; just opening the Edge browser from the desktop took several seconds, a process that happens almost instantly on my desktop computer.
The problem here, as you might have guessed, is this laptop’s absolutely abysmal specs. The processor, an Intel N4020C, is not only five years old, but even when it launched it was considered an ultra-budget chip for mass-produced desktop laptops. With only 4GB of RAM to back it up, trying to perform more than one task at a time immediately caused the system to slow down and stutter, almost to the point of rendering the laptop unusable.
Even in today’s memory climate, 4GB of RAM for a Chromebook — let alone a laptop running Windows 11 — is a risky investment. Whereas Microsoft itself had already pushed for a new standard of 16 GB of RAM for laptopsthese specs don’t seem to be future-proof at all. Worse, the measly 128GB of local storage is an eMMC drive rather than one of the SSDs found in many modern laptops, and it’s painfully slow. Moving and downloading files takes forever. Interestingly, there’s a slot with a removable cover on the underside where you can install a suitable SSD, which would probably help things – but then again, you could just spend that extra money on a better laptop.
Now I’m tempted to place the blame for this one on Microsoft, rather than the factory in China that assembled this atrocity of a laptop. Windows 11 in its current incarnation is horribly optimized for low-end hardware, as well as being stuffed with unnecessary bloatware that clogs up your device. But regardless of who is to be held responsible, the end user experience is just plain bad.
The keyboard is terrible
While the Azeyou certainly wasn’t the flimsy trash can I was expecting, it certainly wasn’t pleasant to use. The outer casing is at least quite sturdy. Combined with the low price, this makes me think that maybe This could be a decent first laptop for a child.
A child also probably wouldn’t have the first big problem I had using the Azeyou, which was tapping on it. Despite the big, ugly bezels around the 11.6-inch display, the overall chassis size is small, which means a small keyboard. The keys seem well spaced at first glance, but they are all reduced just enough compared to the usual ultrabook standard to disrupt your typing if you’re used to a full-sized laptop. I was constantly hitting two keys at once – although I admit that as a 6’3″ man with large hands, there are probably people with more delicate digits who won’t have the same problem.
However, users with thin fingers will still have to deal with the horribly cheap feel of this keyboard. The slightest pressure causes the entire housing to flex noticeably downward; there’s not enough key travel and each press feels squishy and unsatisfying. I’ve typed on a crappy keyboard over the years, but this one is a real contender for the absolute worst. Notably, several negative reviews on the Amazon listing directly mention keys falling out after prolonged use.
The screen is just bad
Look, I’m not a monitor. I have a guy for that (the charming Jeremy Lairdwho I met while working on Maximum PC magazine and knows a lot more about computer screens than I do). This is the one area of the computer industry that, I freely admit, doesn’t interest me much; I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to my screens, and I’m generally not too bothered by a cheap laptop having an unimpressive screen.
That said, I hate the Azeyou screen. The resolution is described as “Full HD” on the Amazon listing, but it is not. To be exact, it’s a resolution of 1366 x 768, sometimes described as “HD Ready” and which was very popular for budget devices five or ten years ago. But these days, it’s pretty old-fashioned – and it shows. “Full HD” generally refers to a resolution of 1920 x 1080 or higher, and when I compared the Azeyou to a true FHD laptop display, the difference was immediately obvious.
Color and contrast are also noticeably poor; everything looks washed out and a bit grainy, and it actually gave me a slight headache after using it at work for a few hours. Of course, it is possible that the headache is due to stress. how slow everything wasbut I’m sure the crappy display didn’t help.
Please don’t buy this laptop
In conclusion, I cannot remotely recommend the Azeyou 11.6-inch laptop. It’s just not a good product. Even battery life, sometimes the saving grace of an underpowered system, is poor; my testing saw it fail at six hours of continuous use, meaning it can’t even get through a full workday without needing to be plugged in – oh, and the power cable is a weird proprietary cable too. No USB-C here.
Unless you urgently need a Windows laptop and your budget can’t reach triple digits, I urge you to save a little longer and buy something with a brand you actually recognize. I can pretty much guarantee that the “Azeyou” branding will be non-existent this time next year, replaced by a new jumble of letters stamped on the lid of an identical laptop, probably made by the same Chinese company.
Consider a Chromebook on our list of best cheap laptops instead, or wait until sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday to snag a discounted model. Ask a friend to lend you money or let you borrow their own laptop. Rob a bank! Okay, maybe not the last one, but seriously, do everything in your power to avoid buying this piece of tech garbage.
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