[Amazon.ca] Basic Windows 11 laptop with 3000×2000 screen, 1 year of Microsoft 365, $151.74

This isn’t going to be appealing for a lot of people, but this is a very inexpensive, name-brand Windows 11 system with a year of Microsoft 365. The cam*l site shows this as an all time low price; I’d gotten one of these in April for $167.11 for sh*ts and giggles (and possibly for future travel), now the same thing is down to $151.74

The good:
-Cheap
-Windows 11 (S, switchable to Home)
-Includes 1 year of Microsoft 365
-3000×2000 resolution IPS screen. That’s not a misprint, it really is that high of a resolution; nearly 3x the pixels of a 1080p screen.
-128GB storage is a real M.2 SSD, not some crummy eMMC.
-US keyboard

The not so good:
-Celeron CPU (confirmed an N5100 on my system, not an N4000 or N4100 as listed in some of the specs on the Amazon product page). This is not quite a very-bottom-of-the-barrel CPU, but it’s sure pokey in 2025.
-Non-upgradable 4GB RAM
-Pretty low-end build quality (on mine the trackpad isn’t quite flush on one edge)
-Barely a brand name (web site is at https://www.mythomson.com/us_en/compute … leron-5914, they seem to be bigger in Europe.)

I can see some use cases for this, as a “burner” secondary system for travel (especially if you are concerned about going over the US border or something), or to have as a productivity PC to use Word and Excel with little temptation to be distracted by games. The high-resolution screen is good for messing with spreadsheets and such.

There is one really annoying thing about the system, at least as I got it: the CPU fan is only off or 100% full on. If it stayed that way it wouldn’t be so bad, but I found that once the CPU warmed up it would be giving a half-second pulse of fan every five seconds, or something like that, and I found that quite irritating. I tried a couple of fan-speed control utilities and they didn’t seem to be able to change the behaviour, so it might be a hardware limitation. Using it with a laptop cooling mat might help keep the fan from triggering.

The cam*l site shows that the price of this cycles around quite a bit, jumping up to $330 and then slowly dropping over time before jumping up again. But this is the lowest I’ve seen it.

Statistics: Posted by Dejiko, nyo! — Jun 6th, 2025 11:09 pm

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