Want a laptop for under £300 that’s actually worth buying? Forget Amazon Prime Day, check out these laptops with huge price cuts

Amazon’s big Prime Day sale may be nearing, but we’re already seeing some early deals – and indeed some cracking bargains on laptops away from Amazon entirely, as rival retailers look to be competitive, no doubt.

Firstly, we have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop, on sale from the manufacturer itself, that has been reduced from £399 to £299, which is an excellent value proposition given the hardware on board. Add to that an MSI Modern 14 notebook on sale at retailer Very which is similarly top-notch value, with its price reduced from £399 to £296.

The trouble with cheap laptops is that they often make compromises with hardware that really hamper the experience.

A budget notebook might, for example, cut corners on the components front by sticking in an old, sluggish processor, or not enough system memory. We quite often see laptops that are under £300 running with the likes of ancient Intel Celeron processors, or a paltry 4GB of RAM – or maybe a tiny amount of slow (eMMC) storage. All of these cost-cutting measures from laptop makers can be serious drawbacks in terms of the performance levels you’ll get.

That’s very definitely not the case with these Dell and MSI laptops. With the Dell Inspiron 15, you’re getting a plenty powerful mid-range AMD Ryzen processor as the engine of the portable, and a relatively spacious (for this price level) and speedy SSD. With the MSI notebook, there’s a workhorse Intel Core i3 CPU and again, for the price, storage (and RAM) isn’t stingy.

Let’s dive into the specs in more detail and see how these bargains stand out from the crowd of pre-Prime Day laptop price cuts.

Today’s best deals for laptops under £300

For other bargains on quality notebooks, head on over to our roundup of the best laptop deals currently out there, and check out some other options for the Dell Inspiron 15 below.