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 best laptops, but they can’t be 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 the three main reasons I would strongly advise against spending your own money (or your employer’s) on a laptop like this.
It’s just slow
As soon as I booted up the Azeyou, we were off to a bad start. The Windows 11 setup process, which should take perhaps 20 minutes on the average modern laptop, took a whopping four hours and ten minutes. Even once I was in, things weren’t loading fast; just opening the Edge browser from the desktop took several seconds, a process that takes place near-instantaneously on my desktop PC.
The problem here, as you might have guessed, is the absolutely abysmal specs on this laptop. The processor, an Intel N4020C, is not only five years old but even when it launched was considered an ultra-budget chip for mass-produced office laptops. With a measly 4GB of RAM backing it up, trying to do more than one task at a time immediately caused system lag and stuttering, almost to the point of rendering the laptop unusable.
Even in the present memory climate, 4GB of RAM for a Chromebook – let alone a laptop running Windows 11 – is a risky investment. Considering that Microsoft itself previously pushed for a new standard of 16GB RAM for laptops, these specs don’t feel future-proof in the slightest. Even 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 quite agonizingly slow. Moving and downloading files takes forever. Interestingly, there is a slot with a removable cover on the underside where you can install a proper SSD, which would probably help matters – but then again, you could just spend that extra money on a better laptop.
Now, I’m tempted to lay the blame for this one with Microsoft, rather than whatever factory in China assembled this atrocity of a laptop. Windows 11 in its current incarnation is pretty horribly optimized for low-end hardware, as well as being rammed with unnecessary bloatware that clogs up your device. But regardless of who should be considered liable, the experience for the end user here is simply bad.
The keyboard feels awful
While the Azeyou admittedly wasn’t the flimsy piece of garbage I was expecting, it certainly didn’t feel great to use. The outer casing is fairly robust, at least. Combined with the low price, that 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 with actually using the Azeyou, which was typing on it. Despite the chunky, ugly bezels around the 11.6-inch screen, the overall size of the chassis is small, and that means a small keyboard. The keys appear well-spaced at first glance, but they’re all scaled down just enough from the usual ultrabook standard to throw off your typing if you’re used to a regular-sized laptop. I was constantly fat-fingering two keys at once – though I’ll admit that as a 6’3” man with large hands, there are likely folks out there with daintier digits who won’t have the same problem.
However, those slender-fingered users will still have to deal with how horribly cheap this keyboard feels to type on. The barest bit of pressure makes the whole housing flex downwards noticeably; there isn’t enough key travel, and every press feels spongy and unsatisfying. I’ve typed on some crap keyboard over the years, but this is a genuine contender for the absolute worst. Notably, several negative reviews on the Amazon listing directly mention keys falling off after extended use.
The screen is just bad
Look, I’m not a monitor person. I have a guy for that (the lovely Jeremy Laird, who I met while working on Maximum PC magazine, and knows far more about computer screens than me). It’s the one area of the computing industry that I freely admit just doesn’t interest me much; I’m quite easy to please when it comes to my screens, and I’m generally not too bothered by a cheap laptop having an unimpressive display.
All that said, I hate the screen on the Azeyou. The resolution is described as ‘Full HD’ on the Amazon listing, but it’s not. To be exact, it’s 1366 x 768, which is sometimes described as ‘HD Ready’ and was pretty popular for budget devices five or ten years back. But these days it’s pretty dated – and it shows. ‘Full HD’ typically refers to 1920 x 1080 resolution or higher, and when I compared the Azeyou to an actual FHD laptop screen, the difference was immediately clear.
The color and contrast are visibly bad, too; everything looks washed-out and a little grainy, and it actually gave me a mild headache after using it for work for a few hours. Granted, it’s possible the headache was stress-induced from how bloody slow everything was, but I’m sure the crappy display wasn’t helping.
Please, do not buy this laptop
In conclusion, I cannot remotely recommend the Azeyou 11.6 Inch Laptop. It’s just not a good product. Even the battery life, sometimes the saving grace of an underpowered system, is poor; my tests saw it fall short of six hours of continuous use, meaning it can’t even make it through a full workday without needing to be plugged in – oh, and the power cable is a weird proprietary one, too. No USB-C here.
Unless you urgently need a Windows laptop and your budget can’t possibly stretch into triple digits, I beg you to save up for a little longer and buy something with a brand name you actually recognise. I can practically guarantee ‘Azeyou’ will be non-existent as a brand this time next year, replaced by a new jumble of letters stamped on the lid of an identical laptop most likely made by the same Chinese company.
Consider a Chromebook from our list of the best cheap laptops instead, or wait until sales events like Prime Day and Black Friday to scoop up a discounted model. Beg a friend to lend you some money or let you borrow their own laptop. Rob a bank! Okay, maybe not that last one, but seriously – do everything in your power to avoid buying this piece of tech trash.
The best laptops for all budgets
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
