This isn’t a sales pitch, or an excuse for an affiliate link. I just recently bought a laptop for under £100 and feel impressed enough with it to share with you all. For the price I paid, it is a stone cold bargain.
Now, I’m not the most techy guy out there. I’ve got a fair idea of what’s what on a computer and what I’m looking for, but I don’t claim to be an IT expert.
When I first cast my eye over this computer, it seemed unusually decent for the price point. It has 4gb of ram (which I understand is the short-term memory on a computer that allows it to multi-task between different programmes). It also has a reasonable – though not impressive – processor, and all the other bits and pieces suggested this was going to be a functional computer.
It’s made by a brand named Coda, and the model is the Coda Sprint. Frankly, I’ve never heard of them before, but at this price I don’t mind.
Lo and behold – it actually works
I bought it for £99 from eBuyer. That included free postage (which was next day delivery).
Booting it up, there was a lot of stuff that needed to be updated and downloaded which initially really slowed the machine down and made me think that perhaps I’d actually bought a lemon.
That seemed to just be the initial slowness as it updated. I’m pleased to report that, nearly 2 weeks later, this thing really works. I’m writing this very article on it, on the train to work.
For me, that was all I wanted: a cheap laptop to take on my commute. I wanted to be able to maximise the amount of productive time in my day, and banging out articles on the train is certainly helping.
The good
This isn’t the perfect laptop, but it has some really good features:
- The general build quality is decent, and the screen is really good for a laptop of this price range (it’s HD).
- The battery life is reasonable. It seems you get around 5 hours from one charge.
- It works for simple tasks. If you’re just browsing the net, or doing some word processing then it’s more than capable for that use. What more do you expect for £99?
- It’s a good size for travel. It is roughly twelve inches wide and reasonably light. So it’s perfect for throwing in your bag and doing things on the move. Not so small it’s hard to use, and not so large that it’s cumbersome.
The not so good
There are of course some downsides in a machine this cheap:
- It’s not a powerful machine. If your expectations of it are too high then you’ll be disappointed. It’s not a gaming laptop, and it’s not meant for tasks much beyond surfing the net and using Microsoft office. But it’s certainly not a machine that’s so slow and cumbersome. It fairly quickly starts up, and I don’t find it hanging when performing the tasks I’ve thrown at it. For the price, I can’t imagine you can get any better.
- The hard drive is really small. It’s only a meager 32gb, and at least half of that is already filled with Windows 10 and the accompanying pre-installed programmes. You can easily expand it by adding a cheap SSD (there’s a hatch on the bottom of the laptop where you can do it yourself). But for me, the spare 16gb should be enough for my usage.
- Some of the components aren’t the highest quality. The trackpad is poor, and overly sensitive. The speakers really aren’t great quality – if I was watching films or YouTube for a long time on this then I’d definitely use headphones.
At the price, this is a corker of a laptop
Frankly, it’s amazing that all of the components for this can be bought and thrown together for that measly price. But I guess that’s how far we’ve come with computing now.
The bottom line is that this is a useful, functioning laptop that you can buy for peanuts. If, like me, you’re in need of a cheap machine for your travels then this could be well worth a look.
If you fancy checking it out, here’s the link to the product on eBuyer. At the time of writing, this has sold out, but they will likely get more in.
Alternatively, you can watch this video which tells you absolutely nothing about the product, but has some fun music (obviously at £99 per laptop the marketing budget isn’t huge):