What you buy is what you get, and it works until it breaks. Unfortunately, the high performance ends there-the Swift 1's Pentium Silver CPU, 4GiB RAM, and 64GB eMMC storage combine for a pretty lackluster experience.Įverything on the Swift 1-with the exception of the battery, the Wi-Fi chipset, and one unpopulated, SATA-only M.2 slot-is soldered on, unrepairable, and un-upgradeable. The best feature of the Swift 1 is its fast boot times-you can expect a cold boot to get to the Windows 10 desktop in around 11 seconds, including POST. When we disassembled the Swift 1, despite being extremely careful and using a soft plastic spudger, we still bent the right side a little bit while getting the back panel off. On the plus side, it has a metallic chassis, not plastic on the minus side, that chassis is extremely thin and very easily bent up. It's not particularly lightweight, but it's quite slender, and its silver-skinned good looks are unassuming. Physically, the Swift 1 strongly resembles a lower-end Chromebook. but it is still an under-$400 laptop, and we're here to test and review cheap laptops, right? Discovering that our Ryzen 5 laptop had magically turned into a Pentium Silver (roughly Celeron-class) laptop and there wasn't anything we could do about, it did not spark joy. There's only a 30-day return/exchange window on laptops at Walmart, but Things Came Up, and we didn't open the box until after that window had shut. Specs at a glance: as reviewedĤGiB DDR4 (soldered, with one empty DIMM slot) It's more powerful, more repairable, more upgrade-able, and in our testing, a bit more reliable as well. To that end, today we're looking at two of Walmart's finest-a $378 Acer Swift 1 and a $350 Gateway GWTN141-2.īoth of these are serviceable if cheap laptops, but the Gateway, despite being the less expensive model, will be the clear winner for most people. Acer's $650 Swift 3 is an excellent choice for budget laptops in the under-$700 range, but we've been really itching to find one in the almost nonexistent sub-$400 category. Further Reading Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 4700U-a budget laptop punching above its classWe've been on the lookout for good but seriously cheap laptops for a while now.
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