Best Windows laptop 2022: Top Windows machines money can buy

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go remains a particular favourite budget laptop for us, and given its nature as a marvellously compact all-rounder, makes it onto this list as one of the best Windows laptops, too.

It’s powered by a 10th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, which may be a couple of generations old at this point, but we still found it offered a great performance that breezed through basic productivity tasks without a hitch, such as typing up work while having a load of browser tabs open at the same time. For software, the Surface Laptop Go boots up in Windows 10S mode, which is more of a locked down form of Windows, although you can get a free upgrade to proper Windows 10, which we’d thoroughly recommend taking advantage of.

The Surface Laptop Go is also a remarkably light laptop, with it tipping the scales at just over a kilo. We found this lightweight build to make it a wonderfully portable option and should make it a fantastic choice for those who are always out and about, such as students. This is also quite a durable feeling laptop, given it’s comprised of a blend of plastic and aluminium on the top cover and keyboard cover, as well as of a generally hard-wearing polycarbonate over the rest of the frame.

The battery life on offer here is pretty decent, with the Surface Laptop Go lasting for 8 and three-quarter hours in our PC Mark 10 office benchmark test. This puts it on par with other Windows laptops of this price.

With the Surface Laptop Go, the only major downside is its lower resolution display. It is a smaller 12-inch panel, but falls some way short of being Full HD with a resolution of 1536 x 1024. During testing, this lower res did mean that pixels and the gaps between them were quite noticeable, although the impressive contrast and brightness of this panel did make up for things somewhat.

There is a new Surface Laptop Go 2 coming out soon, which we haven’t had our hands on just yet, but the original is still a great choice.

Reviewer: Ryan Jones
Full review: Surface Laptop Go review

The Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED is a true powerhouse of a laptop, not only great option for office-based productivity tasks, but also for the likes of video editing, too.

Inside, you’ll find it features one of AMD’s all-new Ryzen 6000 laptop processors that we found during testing to offer a super-speedy performance that was pushing Apple’s M1 chip with its benchmark scores. This meant it was superb at casual browsing as well as even more intense tasks such as video and photo editing.

Alongside some rather beefy internals, we found this Asus laptop’s display to be sublime. As an OLED panel, it offered up sone truly vibrant colours and unparalleled black levels, which made it especially fantastic for watching videos. Colour space coverage also proved to be incredible, ensuring that the Zenbook 13 S OLED’s display is one of the best for creatives.

In addition, the battery life proved to be some of the best we’ve seen, with this laptop lasting for 13 and a half hours or so with our PC Mark 10 Modern Office benchmark test.

It might be argued that the design of this beast of an ultrabook is a little plain, with a nondescript metal deck that could suggest it’s a little cheaper feeling than other ultrabooks out there. With that being said, the Zenbook S 13 OLED is slimmer than other 13-inch laptops such as the Dell XPS 13 OLED (2021) at just 14.9mm thick.

While this makes it looks ultra modern, it has the unwanted effect of meaning this laptop has very little in the way of ports – there’s only three USB-C connections and a headphone jack. Anything larger doesn’t seem to be present, and for those, you’ll need to plug in dongles.

Reviewer: Ryan Jones
Full review: Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED review

The Huawei MateBook 14s is a fantastic Windows laptop for those looking for an ultra-portable device.

A weight of 1.43kg makes this relatively light for a 14-inch laptop, although we found its metal build and general heft to make this a sturdy choice. We found the keyboard to be tactile and offer good feedback, while the trackpad was roomy and responsive. Port selection here isn’t too bad with a selection of Thunderbolt-capable USB-C connections, as well as an HDMI and headphone jack.

The display here is also excellent with the MateBook 14s’ panel looking vibrant and bright, with the resolution clocking in at 2520×1680. The 90% screen to body ratio also meant you get a lot of screen real estate with some small bezels that we found to look especially good. Moreover, the 14-inch screen size proved perfect for productivity, although its sub-par Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour coverage means this isn’t the best laptop to be used for the likes of professional video editing.

The Intel Core i7-11730H processor offered a speedy performance in our benchmark tests and in the real world too. SSD read and write speeds also proved to be snappy, meaning this laptop should be able to load and saves files incredibly quickly, and we also found it to boot up in an instant too.

The only real disappointing thing with the MateBook 14s is its battery life, although we must stress that it’s perfectly serviceable. In testing, it lasted just over 9 hours, which means you’ll be able to get through a working day with juice to spare, and will survive those days where you forget to bring in a charger. 

Reviewer: Gemma Ryles
Full review: Huawei MateBook 14s review

The XPS laptops have always been some of the most stylish Windows laptops money can buy, and the Dell XPS 15 looks to continue that trend with a sleek carbon-fibre and aluminium casing.

A weight of 1.8kg makes this a heavier laptop, but given its supremely thin chassis at just 18mm thick, we found it to feel fantastic. The thin chassis may look good, but it comes with the disadvantage of losing out on any full-size ports such as HDMI, USB-A or Ethernet. To make up for this somewhat, the XPS 15 comes with Thunderbolt 4 and an SD card reader.

You get a 15.6-inch panel here, which is on the larger side, with a 16:10 aspect ratio so you can take advantage of slightly more vertical space. Even as an LCD panel, this display features fantastic contrast and almost OLED-type black levels, and also turned out to be one of the most colour-accurate panels we’ve tested.

The Dell XPS 15 also packs a powerful Intel Core i7-11800H processor that blitzed through general productivity tasks in testing. As an H-series processor, it’s specifically designed for more intense workloads such as video or photo editing. It also comes with 32GB of RAM, and the addition of an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU.

The battery life of the XPS 15 is pretty decent for a laptop this powerful. In testing, we found it to last for an average of 10 hours. This means you should be able to outlast a working day comfortably with some capacity to spare.

Reviewer: Mike Jennings
Full review: Dell XPS 15 (2021) review

Generally speaking, the larger the screen the heavier the laptop, but the LG Gram 16 does away with this rule by fitting a 16-inch screen on a laptop with a 1.2kg frame. For reference, that’s only 100g more than the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go we’ve listed above, and that has a 12-inch screen. This LG laptop is so lightweight that it actually holds a Guinness World Record for being the lightest commercially available 16-inch laptop. However, its magnesium-alloy construction does have some flex under pressure, but that’s the price for such a lightweight laptop.

That massive 16-inch panel, that comes with a high 2560×1500 resolution. We found this to offer incredibly sharp images, especially compared to a more standard Full HD screen. With 333 nits of measured brightness, this is also quite a vibrant panel and offered good contrast, too.

The inclusion of the Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor should mean the LG Gram 16 is reasonably powerful, although in testing, we found it to lag behind some of the competition that comes with exactly the same chipset. It’s still perfectly serviceable for productivity tasks, but just note that the lighter nature of this laptop means its cooling isn’t as up to scratch as heavier laptops that will, in the long run, give you better performance.

The battery life on offer is absolutely incredible, as we found the Gram to last for just over 15 hours during our benchmarks, which puts this premium laptop above a lot of other candidates.

Reviewer: Ryan Jones
Full review: LG Gram 16 (2021) review