A good Windows 11 laptop for $220? Don’t wait for Prime Day, this Asus Vivobook half-price deal blows budget Chromebooks out of the water
A deal that renders your average budget Chromebook kind of pointless
Hunting for a cheap laptop? You might be waiting for Prime Day to grab a bargain on a notebook, but why wait, when Best Buy has one of the best laptop deals we’ve seen in quite some time at the budget end of the market?
Right now you can pick up the Asus Vivobook from Best Buy for $220, which is very nearly half the recommended price of $430.
For that money, you’re getting a highly performant processor (relative to the outlay) in the form of the Intel Core i3-1215U, which is a 6-core Alder Lake CPU that’ll handle anything you throw at it in terms of daily computing. The integrated graphics here will even take care of a spot of casual gaming, which is quite something at this price level.
You get 8GB of RAM backing up that CPU, and there’s a 128GB SSD. So yes, the latter is something of a weak spot, although if you were buying a Chromebook at this sort of level, you’d face the same situation, storage-wise – and you'd need to use the cloud (or as an alternative, maybe an external drive for extra space).
In short, given the price, you can’t really bemoan the lack of storage, as this laptop would never be anywhere near $200 if it had a larger SSD.
As cheap Windows 11 laptops go, this is as affordable as they come really, without the specifications descending into compromises that’d really irk you far more than a smallish SSD.
Today's best Asus Vivobook 14 deal
Asus Vivobook 14-inch Laptop: was $429.99 now $219.99 at Best Buy
This Vivobook gives you a 14-inch screen with a Full HD resolution, and a peppy 12th-gen Intel chip which is as good as you’ll get, processor-wise, in this kind of price bracket for truly affordable laptops. You’ll get enough grunt for a bit of casual gaming, or any basic computing workload, and a 10-hour battery life, all with a chunky $210 discount. This deal might shift pretty quickly, mind.
For other bargains on affordable notebooks, head on over to our roundup of the best laptop deals currently out there.
And those would-be buyers of the Vivobook 14 worried about storage might want to have a look at our top portable hard drive deals for Amazon Prime Day – plus you can check out more Asus Vivobook deals below.
Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).