Tip number one: don’t buy a laptop with a hard drive

Years ago, all laptops had hard drives, which store data on spinning platters. However, any laptop that runs off a hard drive feels annoyingly slow these days.

A laptop with an SSD drive is ideal, but even cheaper “eMMC” storage is better than a hard drive. The massive amount of storage hard drives offer may seem irresistible if the budget is tight, but we’d strongly recommend buying a laptop with smaller but faster storage. You can always pick up an external hard drive for cheap file archiving further down the line.

Tip number two: avoid TN screens if you can

Look at the specs page of a laptop for a mention of this. It may also be called SVA, which some manufacturers use to signify standard viewing angle.

Instead, we want a screen described as IPS or WVA (wide viewing angle). This basically tells us it doesn’t have a TN (twisted nematic) screen. Why the TN hate? These displays look pretty bad unless you view them dead on, and even then just don’t look as good as IPS/WVA displays because they tend to have very low contrast. TN screens in budget laptops do, anyway.

These are your two red alert messages. Avoid hard drives and TN screens, although the latter may be unavoidable if you’re looking to spend as little as possible.

The rest depends on your budget. If you want great performance, look for a laptop with an 11th generation Intel Core series processor or a 5th generation AMD Ryzen. All of these are excellent.

You don’t tend to find them in ultra-cheap laptops, leaving you with Intel Celeron and Pentium processors. These will do the job just fine for simple work, like writing documents, web browsing and video streaming. But if you want to use Photoshop, edit videos or play games, it’s worth saving a bit more for a powerful laptop.

Most of the laptops here use Windows. We’ve also included a Chromebook, a great option if you want to spend £200-300. Basic navigation in Chromebooks tends to feel faster than in Windows 10 when dealing with a low-end CPU, and while they can’t run Windows apps, you can download Android apps for them.

HP Pavilion 14, £549

Great all-round affordable touchscreen laptop

Pros

• Decent screen
• Nice design
• Touchscreen

Cons

• Limited display colour saturation

If you’re looking for an affordable laptop that minimises what you miss out on, take a look at the HP Pavilion 14. It has a metal lid and keyboard surround. It doesn’t look too bad and is only a little heavier than the “slim and light” class average at 1.4kg.

The screen is a 14-inch Full HD IPS LCD, which is what we want. Brightness is solid, and while colour saturation is limited, we’re willing to take that hit at this price. It’s a touch display, too, relatively rare in this class.

HP puts extra effort into the speakers too, which is great if you’re a student who needs a laptop to double as a TV. It has performance chops as well, with 256GB storage, 8GB RAM and an Intel Core i3 at £549.

If you can afford the £50 bump up to the Intel Core i5 version and like video games, we’d recommend the jump. You get a significantly better graphics processor in the step-up model. Don’t care about gaming and would rather hold onto that £50? The Core i3 version is perfectly solid.

The HP Pavilion 14 is available to buy from: