I spend a lot of my time testing and reviewing new laptops. But no matter how hard I try, there will always be people that go to Amazon.com and buy whatever cheap, crappy thing comes up for the “best laptop” search term. That's especially true now that these retailer pages are showing up in Google search results for the same query.
As I perused Amazon's list, I found myself getting angry at the number of laptops I saw that no one should buy. And I mean that. In almost every case, you'll find laptops that have better alternatives at the same price, but Amazon won't show them—for whatever reason.
I hope I'm not the first person to tell you that buying unknown products on Amazon is not a smart idea, but when it comes to your laptop, it's an especially bad idea. Your work, school, gaming, or creative ambitions will all be severely hampered by buying one of these machines. The egregious thing about these laptops isn't that they exist, but that Amazon ranks them higher than proper laptops—the kind people should actually buy.
Ultra-Cheap Windows Laptop
You'll never get the same results, but all the times I've tried searching (including in Incognito), I saw tons of ultra-cheap Windows laptops that cost under $300. You might look at these and wonder what could be wrong, especially since some of these sport seemingly solid specs like “Quad-Core” processors and 256 GB of storage. But don't be fooled.
One of the most egregious examples that showed up on page one of Amazon's results was this HP laptop. Despite being a nearly four-year-old laptop with a typo in the title (who doesn't want an “Ultral” Light laptop?), this is apparently an “Amazon's Choice” selection that comes highly recommended with four out of five stars. These kinds of laptops are propped up by ratings from years ago, when this laptop would have been slightly more relevant. It would have been a stretch in 2022, but today? No way.
The laptop comes with an Intel Celeron processor, which is way too slow for a Windows 11 laptop. I've tested plenty of these in my day to know that you'll feel it chug along with even the most basic tasks. The title of the product is also highly misleading, saying it comes with 192 GB of storage. Only 64 GB of that is onboard storage—the rest is from the bundled 128-GB SD card. Even worse, the storage you get is eMMC, a much slower (and cheaper) storage format.
Lastly, it comes with Windows 11 S Mode, a version of Windows that doesn't allow you to download applications from a web browser. Then there's the kicker: the 1366 x 768-resolution screen. Never buy a laptop with anything less than 1920 x 1080 resolution in 2026, no matter how cheap it is. That's the same problem with two other HP laptops right on the first page: the HP Stream 14 from 2024 and this HP 15.6-inch Laptop from 2025. Both have 1366 x 768-resolution screens.