The Microsoft Surface laptop go it’s a budget laptop that looks really great.
What’s not to love?
I’m gonna tell you what I liked about it and wanted it.
Making a budget laptop that looks good and works well.
Well that’s a really tough bar.
It’s really hard to do so Microsoft Seems to be on the right track with a lot of the surface laptop go that is their new, less expensive version of the surface laptop.
So when I first heard about the surface go, I was pretty excited on paper.
It seemed like a really good idea.
Even at the least expensive $550 version, you got a new 10th generation Intel Core i five at a very nice looking body.
Most of the chassis is aluminum.
Very decent looking keyboard large touchpad half decent webcam.
Alright What’s not to like here?
Now that catches the one that Microsoft sent me is not the $550 version.
Is the most expensive of three different configurations.
This one is $900.
And again, it has the same core i five CPU within the low power version of that chip.
main differences are in the two more expensive versions.
You get eight gigs of RAM instead of just four gigs of RAM.
And trying to run Windows on four gigs of RAM.
You’re kinda on the borderline there and that’s one of the reasons why this laptop ships with Windows 10S, which is the more limited version of Windows 10.
It’s not really all that more limited.
It just has these artificial bumpers on it where you can just install any software you want and run it.
You can only install apps from the Microsoft Store that are approved for use on a Windows 10 S system.
It takes about four seconds to get it out of that mode into regular Windows 10 mode.
And you need to do that the first time you want to install even a different browser, like Chrome or Brave.
And it says here’s what you do, press this button, now you have regular windows 10.
Okay, so you got that out of the way.
But that also means you can try to run things like big elaborate video games, and premiere and things that are just not gonna run well on this system.
And that’s why they put those those bumpers on.
So the least expensive version of the $550 surface laptop go.
It’s got four gigs of RAM and it’s got 64 gigs of built in storage.
That’s really not enough, especially if you’re spending $500 for something.
So I’m just going to put a thumb tack in that one right there.
I think you should have eight gigs of RAM I pretty much any windows 10 laptop.
And you know with the OS system 64 gigs it’s just not enough for anything you’re going to store there.
There’s going to be a cloud based machine almost like a Chromebook in a way Microsoft says, if you use OneDrive a lot, well then you won’t need space locally.
Fortunately, the $700 version has a 128gig solid state drive.
And that’s pretty decent.
Not generous these days, but okay, acceptable.
And the $900 version has a 256 gig drive again with the eight gigs of RAM.
That’s perfectly fine.
But once you get up to 900 dollars well then maybe you should buy a MacBook Air or an XPS 13 or the regular surface laptop, which is the laptop I really like a lot usually goes on sale around holiday season and that’s coming right up.
So maybe I’d wait and see what kind of deals they had on that.
You do however get a very nice 12.4 inch 3:2 aspect ratio screen, that means the screen is is very tall compared to most laptop screens which are 16 by 9, that’s that kind of letterbox movie style.
The three two screen actually has a lot of advantages.
It makes the screen feel much bigger than it is.
And you have more room when scrolling up and down when scrolling vertically on things like, email, you basically see more rows of your email and they are Office documents, spreadsheets, anything you’re working on, students really get a lot of benefit out of these three, two screens.
So I like that.
And I like the keyboard for a budget laptop, especially on the $500 version is a really nice keyboard.
I had one key left control key that was a little felt a little sticky on mine, but other than that very good keyboard, very big touchpad.
It’s also a 10 point touchscreen, which you don’t always get in the five to $600 range.
So I thought that was Was really good as well.
Another feature I like on my surface laptop go is the Windows Hello fingerprint reader that’s built into the power button.
Unfortunately you only get that in the two more expensive models, not the $550 model.
So using this version of the surface laptop go for several days.
I found I used it as my main laptop pretty much all day over the course of maybe three to four days I only had to plug it in and recharge it once.
When I did a full battery drain test.
I got almost 10 hours of streaming video playback on it, and Microsoft says this should get about 13 hours.
Whatever they call regular use, emails are for the web, turning it off turning it on leaving it for a while picking it up for a while.
So that sounds in the right ballpark to me.
I’m not unhappy with ten hours of constant streaming video battery life on an inexpensive laptop.
I think that’s actually great.
If you want to get the most bang for your buck.
Speed wise, will then get a more plasticky laptop Dell and HP and everybody and Acer they all sell these really plasticky big 15 inch laptops, and you get a core i five and the eight gigs of RAM and 128 gigs or 256 gigs of storage.
Offer five or $600, but those are big, bulky plastic monsters, you’re not gonna get something that’s small and sleek looking like this.
And I think out of the three models that they have the 550 is a little too limited.
The low memory the low storage space missing that fingerprint reader, the super high end version, the $900 version.
Again, if I’m spending $900 my options really open up and there’s a lot of other things I would look at.
Right in the middle, the $700 version, eight gigs of RAM, 128 gig hard drive and all the other bells and whistles.
I feel that’s actually a pretty good laptop.
If I was shopping for something that was inexpensive but still look really nice was highly portable, had good battery life.
A decent keyboard and a decent screen and a touchscreen.
And I was willing to say I’m judging this on 60% style, 40% components and performance.
Well, then I’d say that middle version of the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go is the one you should look at.
