If you need something basic to get online, do meetings, and do some work here and there, then a budget laptop is a great option. Take the IdeaPad 1 from Lenovo; not only is it going for $200, rather than the usual $330, but it has a big screen and a 1MP camera for you to work with.

Why you should buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 1

One thing that the IdeaPad 1 has going for it is the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U, a reasonably powerful mobile processor roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th-generation Intel i5 CPU, so it’s quite powerful. If you aren’t familiar with either company’s CPUs, suffice it to say that the Athlon Silver is great and will easily handle all the productivity tasks you can throw at it and even handle a bit of streaming as well. Luckily you get an impressive 15.6-inch screen that can handle 220 nits of peak brightness, which isn’t too bad for a budget laptop. That said, it only runs on HD resolution, so it’s not the best if you plan to stream a lot of Netflix or Disney+ on your off time.

As for the RAM, it is admittedly on the low end at 4GBs, but the IdeaPad 1 runs Windows 11 on S mode, so it doesn’t eat up as much RAM as it would on the default mode. As for storage, you get 128GBs to work with, which sadly can’t be upgraded internally, but at least you can grab one of these external hard drive deals to supplement it. As for the overall build, it’s pretty good, at least for a budget laptop, and the battery life should last you several hours, especially if you don’t crank the brightness up too high.

All in all, the IdeaPad 1 is an excellent budget laptop that is hard to beat at the $200 price tag that Lenovo has on its site. Of course, if you want something with a little bit more power behind it, there are some other great laptop deals you can take advantage of. Alternatively, if you’re willing to eschew Windows, you could always go with one of these Chromebook deals instead since they tend to be cheaper and will give you a better experience.

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