The No. 4 seller on Amazon, HP’s 14-inch Laptop, is a complicated laptop story. The first thing that grabs you is the price: It’s a Windows 10 Home laptop for $219. The second thing is the screen: It’s a higher-resolution 1920×1080 panel that makes the 1366×768 screens you get in this price range seem janky. Even better, it uses superior IPS technology. IPS gives you excellent off-axis viewing, and rarely, if ever, provides a bad experience, whereas so-called “IPS-like” or “wide-viewing angle” panels run the gamut from bad to good.
Even the AMD E2-7110 CPU isn’t half bad. Like the AMD A6-7310, it’s slower than Core i3, but generally slightly faster than a Celeron “N” CPU. So what’s the catch? Storage. HP outfits the creatively named 14-inch Laptop with a 32GB eMMC drive. While eMMC can yield a more responsive feel than a hard drive, the limited space is problematic on a Windows-based laptop.
This laptop will basically give you a great screen to look at and reasonable responsiveness from its eMMC drive, but the minute you fill up the drive (which won’t take long), the experience is going to take a dive.
It’s really a shame, because with just a little more storage space or a hard drive option (along with the eMMC), this could be an incredible bargain laptop. As it is, you need to really consider this laptop’s limitations before you buy one. Our verdict: thumbs down.
Acer Aspire E 15
Amazon Best-Seller Rank: No. 5
Amazon
Take last year’s best-selling Acer Aspire E 15, update the CPU, add a USB Type C port, and you pretty much have the No. 5 Amazon laptop.
Yes, it looks the same as the No. 1 selling Acer Aspire E 15 above, but there’s a world of difference here. The main one is the graphics. With a GeForce 940MX, you’re getting reasonable graphics performance from a budget laptop. The second difference is storage. This particular Acer Aspire E 15 dumps the hard drive for a 256GB M.2 SSD. That means this laptop will likely feel and act a lot more responsive than dog-slow hard disk drive-based laptops in most use cases. Although we haven’t confirmed it, Amazon customers have reported that a hard drive upgrade is a snap on this model.
Acer also doubles the RAM from the base model to 8GB. The CPU is Intel’s latest 7th-generation Core i5-7200U, which is the same chip used in laptops that cost twice as much as the Aspire E 15.
If there were two things to ding about this laptop, it would be the weight and the price. At 5.3 pounds, it’s not as light as the competition. And at $579, it stretches the definition of budget laptop.
Still, if you want snappier performance at a good price and don’t care about the weight, the Acer Aspire E 15 is a thumbs up
[Source”cnbc”]