Want a laptop for under £300 that’s actually worth buying? Forget Amazon Prime Day, check out these laptops with huge price cuts

Dell Inspiron 15 on green background with big savings text overlay
(Image credit: Future)

Amazon’s big Prime Day sale may be nearing, but we’re already seeing some early deals – and indeed some cracking bargains on laptops away from Amazon entirely, as rival retailers look to be competitive, no doubt.

Firstly, we have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop, on sale from the manufacturer itself, that has been reduced from £399 to £299, which is an excellent value proposition given the hardware on board. Add to that an MSI Modern 14 notebook on sale at retailer Very which is similarly top-notch value, with its price reduced from £399 to £296.

The trouble with cheap laptops is that they often make compromises with hardware that really hamper the experience.

A budget notebook might, for example, cut corners on the components front by sticking in an old, sluggish processor, or not enough system memory. We quite often see laptops that are under £300 running with the likes of ancient Intel Celeron processors, or a paltry 4GB of RAM – or maybe a tiny amount of slow (eMMC) storage. All of these cost-cutting measures from laptop makers can be serious drawbacks in terms of the performance levels you’ll get.

That’s very definitely not the case with these Dell and MSI laptops. With the Dell Inspiron 15, you’re getting a plenty powerful mid-range AMD Ryzen processor as the engine of the portable, and a relatively spacious (for this price level) and speedy SSD. With the MSI notebook, there’s a workhorse Intel Core i3 CPU and again, for the price, storage (and RAM) isn’t stingy.

Let’s dive into the specs in more detail and see how these bargains stand out from the crowd of pre-Prime Day laptop price cuts.

Today’s best deals for laptops under £300

Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop: £399£299 at Dell

Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop: was £399 now £299 at Dell
Dell’s Inspiron sports a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS display and an AMD Ryzen 5 7520U processor with integrated Radeon graphics, backed up by 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM. You also get a 512GB NVMe SSD, rounding off a good range of components at this price point, plus the Windows 11 laptop itself has nice, clean lines (and trim bezels). At this price, it’s a great buy make no mistake.

MSI Modern 14 C12M: £399£296.10 at Very.co.ukVTQ9M

MSI Modern 14 C12M: was £399 now £296.10 at Very.co.uk
MSI’s 14-inch laptop offers a Full HD display, a good level of portability being decently light and compact, and some sensible choices for components too. You get plenty of power courtesy of an Intel Core i3-1215U (Alder Lake, 6-core) CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. Do note you need to apply a discount voucher to get an extra 10% off the reduced price, so use the code VTQ9M to get the full deal at checkout.

For other bargains on quality notebooks, head on over to our roundup of the best laptop deals currently out there, and check out some other options for the Dell Inspiron 15 below.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).