MicrosoftSurface Laptop Go

A small laptop with a 12.4-inch screen, weighing just 1.12kg. It’s light, compact and will fit into an overstuffed bag or backpack very easily. There aren’t many mid-range laptops this small, so it should appeal to frequent travellers or those who carry their laptop to lectures and events.

Specifications-wise, it’s a mixed bag. The Core i5 processor has four cores, which is good for quickly opening webpages and programs. But there’s just 4GB of Ram – which is fine for lighter use but no good if you want to open lots of programs or edit photos – and only 64GB of storage. After the laptop has been set up, this leaves you just 28GB Of usable storage. What’s more, the storage is of the slower ‘eMMC’ type rather than a proper solid-state drive (SSD), meaning it won’t be as fast at loading files and big programs.

You can upgrade to 8GB of Ram and 128GB of SSD storage for an extra £150. This is worth considering, especially if you do work that involves multi-tasking with lots of documents and programs open.

There is just one full-size USB port, one USB-C port and a headphone jack. The lack of more full-size ports could be annoying if you want to connect more than two USB devices at once, such as a mouse and a pen drive. The laptop is charged using Microsoft’s proprietary Surface Connect charger, which attaches magnetically. You can also buy Surface Connect docks to expand the number of ports. This cheapest version of the Surface Laptop Go doesn’t have a fingerprint reader, but the upgraded models with more storage and Ram do.