This is the world’s cheapest laptop – but you probably shouldn’t buy it

[sincity]

At £83.25 (about $106, excluding taxes), the Thomson X5 Neo 10 is probably the cheapest laptop in the world, but there is a reason why. It uses the bare minimum in terms of hardware to meet the requirements of Windows 10.

Available in black or white, the laptop is powered by a three-year-old Intel Atom processor, the X5-Z8350, paired with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, with less than half of it free because of the size of the operating system (OS).

• These PC optimizers could perhaps boost the performance of the X5
• Read more about the best laptops on the market right now

In a clear nudge to its Netbook forefathers, Thomson engineers decided to use a 10.1-inch display, complete with inch-thick bezels and with a 1,024 x 600-pixel resolution, the only Windows laptop on the market to offer such a low resolution.

You do get Windows 10 Home, which by itself costs about as much as the laptop, a 6-hour battery life, a card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, a 0.3-megapixel webcam, an audio socket and a microHDMI connector.

At less than 1kg, it is eminently portable but we don’t know if that will help, given that its performance will be abysmal. Perhaps the only bright spot is the two year warranty; you should be able to improve its capacity by adding a 128GB microSD card ($14.99 at Amazon) to quintuple the available storage capacity. Just remember to use a reputable brand.

• Check out the best cheap laptops on the market.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techradar/digital-home/~4/A8GVNhV6eEI