12 Best laptops under £400 in the UK in 2022: Comparison Table & Editor's Pick

What would you expect from a laptop for under £400? You have to assume that laptops in this price range are always a trade-off. You can’t expect them to have high-quality plastic, saturated colors on the screen, or a responsive touchpad. If you are lucky, they will be, but do not expect to have them by default.

Besides, in this price range, it is worth buying laptops only from well-known brands. They are more likely to serve the entire warranty period, given that cheap components are used in these laptops.

What kind of tasks can a laptop under £400 tackle? In most cases, these laptops can do tasks like Internet surfing, typing, and watching videos. Also, you can run games released in the early 2000s. They are not well-suited for full-fledged game streaming but are quite suitable for simple webcam broadcasting. With such a laptop, forget about image and video processing because their graphic cards will not be able to handle heavy graphic editing software like Photoshop or any video processing software.

If you are looking for a gaming laptop, you should pick a laptop within the price range around £600, which is equipped with GTX 1650 generation cards.

Editor's Pick of the Best Laptops Under £400 | Reviews

Below, you will find a review of the best-selling laptops at a price ranging from £270 to £400. You may pick an inexpensive model for essential functions, a lightweight and convenient laptop for on-the-go users, or a high-performance HP laptop.

2020 Lenovo IdeaPad Laptop | Best Energy-Efficient Display

This 14-inch Lenovo IdeaPad laptop features 1366 x 768 HD display resolution, 4 GB memory size, 64GB eMMC flash memory, dual-core processing, and 802.11ac wireless LAN. With a weight of 4.4 pounds, it looks a bit bulkier than its analogs from competitive brands. The advantage of this laptop is the energy-efficient LED backlight providing a bright picture and reduced energy consumption.

For the price, it is a nice laptop. The setup is easy the battery lasts about 5 hours on a full charge. Sometimes, the device runs slightly slow, but you will not have to wait more than 10 seconds. It is a good choice for basic functions and works but not for video streaming.

2020 Lenovo IdeaPad Laptop: Check the current price

ASUS VivoBook L203MA Laptop | Best Battery Life

Equipped with a long-lasting 10-hour battery, this laptop is well-suited for all-day computing and is a great choice for on-the-go users. Additionally, it weighs just 2.1 pounds and is smaller than A4 size (11.30 x 7.60 x 0.67 inches). So you can easily take this convenient laptop anywhere or put it in your bag. The ASUS VivoBook L203MA is powered by efficient Intel processors, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, and 64GB eMMC Flash Storage. It uses Intel UHD Graphics 600 and Windows 10 in S Mode.

Due to its portability, the laptop has a smaller 11.6-inch display with a 1366 x 768 resolution. This product has been the #1 best seller in the Traditional Laptop Computers category for a long time and is popular. The laptop can easily play light games, while the keyboard and mouse work smoothly. However, if you will store lots of pictures and videos on it, you are likely to run out of space.

ASUS VivoBook L203MA Laptop: Check the current price

2020 Newest HP 14 Inch Premium Laptop | Best High-Speed

With a higher price compared to other products on the list, this HP 14 Inch Premium laptop offers enhanced features, such as 8GB DDR4 RAM and 128GB SSD for multitasking without lags. It comes with Windows 10 S, the latest OS from Microsoft. With a 2.30GHz dual-core AMD Athlon Silver processor, the device operates at a 3.20 GHz CPU speed. So you can even try to run games on high settings.

Another advantage of this model is the 14-inch anti-glare WLED-backlit HD display. It effectively reduces the light reflected off the display, preventing eye strain and enhancing colors. The laptop has two USB 3.1 ports, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, an HDMI, a combination audio jack, and a multi-format SD media card reader. To sum up, this option is ideal for office workers and students.

HP 14 Inch Premium laptop: Check the current price

Testing & Customers Reviews

Here are the reviews from YouTube bloggers who tested the laptops and have found them effective and worth buying.

ProductNation: "Today we're taking a look at the top features on the Huawei Matebook D15. We've got a 15.6 inch full HD full view display a light and compact body weighing in at just about 1.5 kgs. We've also got a smart fingerprint sensor built into the power button, as well as a retractable camera placed within the keyboard. Apart from that we have the multi-screen collaboration between different Huawei devices, meaning that you can use your tablet as a secondary display to extend your laptop and much more.

It really reminded me of the old-school Macbook Pro from back in the day. Pretty similar design and layout to it, as you can see the sides of the keyboard are kind of on the larger side right here.

Now, as i mentioned in the beginning of the video, the power button also doubles as a fingerprint scanner, so, as you tap on it without pressing it down even it's going to unlock the laptop itself. Works not the fastest, but it's pretty decent speed i guess it'll take about a second, second and a half to unlock the device. Works pretty well pretty secure.

A lot of things in this video i'm going to classify as decent and the display is one of them. You get a pretty decent 15.6 inch ips panel, it's a 1080p resolution with 141 pixels per inch. You also get a pretty nice i guess screen to body ratio, so the bezels aren't very thick around it and there's no camera to really interrupt the borders of the display, because the camera, like i mentioned earlier, is built in to the keyboard.

That brings us to the keyboard performance and the integration that i told you guys about earlier for the camera. The keyboard on this is pretty decent typing on this feels pretty good. It's not the best keyboar out there i did have a few miss clicks. But it's pretty standard and it takes a little bit of getting used to once you do uh it's a pretty good keyboard to use like i said again a pretty decent keyboard.

Now, bringing it back to the pros and the cons. Like i said, pretty much everything i mentioned about the ecosystem, just put that in the pro column that's one of the biggest pros you'll get on there.

The second pros obviously would be the build quality and design. It's pretty lightweight, you can take it around anywhere and then hooking that up with your mate view the tablet whatever, it may be gives you a very solid portable experience, which i do definitely like.

Now when it comes to the cons on this i would say it feels like a very old school laptop, it feels like a laptop from like i said 2013-2014. Kind of clunky but that's just me i think i like the more sleek look the more stylistic design. But, i mean, it's a pretty, like i said, decent standard laptop, so if you don't mind that you're gonna be okay with this.

Another thing, which i didn't like, i didn't like the keyboard and typing experience on this i've kind of been spoiled by the Macbook typing experience. But, i do like the fingerprint scanner built in as well as that camera, that retracts and goes back in pretty cool stuff to see on a device like this.

So, lastly, do i recommend this device, like i said, if you're in the Huawei system, definitely recommend it."