On the whole, I don’t think you should buy a Windows laptop with less than 16GB of RAM — but I do think you should buy a dirt-cheap laptop if you can make some easy upgrades. It’s a great way to get a decent laptop at a bargain-bin price.
And now’s your chance to do that because right now this upgradeable Asus Vivobook 14 is on sale for just $210 at Best Buy. That’s a whopping $220 off its original $430 price, a 51 percent discount.
The Vivobook X1404ZA is a pretty decent deal at this price, with a 12th-gen Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, and an admittedly small 128GB SSD for storage. It’s a good basic machine for browsing the web, watching video, and maybe playing very low-power games.
But the kicker here is that you can pop the laptop’s bottom off and get access to a DDR4 RAM slot and a user-replaceable M.2 Gen 4 drive.
So if you combine this hot deal with this 16GB RAM upgrade for $22 and this 512GB SSD upgrade for $41, you can get a far more capable machine for under $300 total (before taxes). That’s an absolute steal, and all you need is a screwdriver, some elbow grease, and a Windows re-install. You can do it. I believe in you.
Other high points of the design include a 1080p non-touch screen, 10 hours of battery life, plus triple USB-A, one USB-C, and one full-sized HDMI port. The only real downer for me is that you can’t charge it via USB-C — it needs an old-fashioned barrel charger — but that might be an acceptable trade-off to get a laptop this cheap.
Best Buy has offered this laptop on sale before, but this is a limited-time deal that’s only good today (October 30). It’s also available on Best Buy’s official eBay store, which might be worth a try if it’s out of stock or otherwise gone from the main product page.
