MacBooks have been in the news a lot over the last few years thanks to their remarkable speed and power efficiency, but the best Windows laptops are finally competitive thanks to the latest chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm.
I know because my team and I have been reviewing dozens and dozens of laptops from top companies every year, so I've had a front-row seat to the arms race between Apple, Google and Microsoft.
The result is ultraportable Windows 11 powerhouses like the Dell XPS 13, which we recommend to most folks as the best Windows laptop overall. Personally I'm not a fan of the capacitive function keys and invisible touchpad, but I can't quibble with he big improvements in speed and battery life it gains from its new Snapdragon X chips.
But several older Windows laptops without Snapdragon chips remain on this list because they continue to deliver killer value for the price. If you want a great workhorse laptop for not a lot of money, for example, I highly recommend the Acer Aspire Go 15 because its a full Windows laptop for under $500. But if you want something more powerful for gaming, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is a great choice we regularly recommend.
Based on our testing, these are the best Windows laptops you can buy, and you can read our full review of each machine to help you make a smarter buying decision.
The quick list
In a hurry? Here's a brief overview of the laptops on this list, along with quick links that let you jump down the page directly to a review of whichever laptop catches your eye.
The Dell XPS 13 (2024) is our top recommendation for best Windows laptop now that it has the power of Snapdragon X chips inside, which give this portable powerhouse killer speed and MacBook-beating battery life.
The Acer Aspire Go 15 is a great Windows laptop for those on a tight budget since it delivers a solid 1080p display, a comfy keyboard and good battery life for $300. It's not fast or powerful, but it's fine for writing papers or web surfing.
The Asus Zenbook 14 Flip OLED is one of the best 2-in-1 laptops if you love Windows 11 because it looks and feels great, offers lots of ports, enough power for work or play and a lovely 2.8K OLED panel. The webcam isn't amazing, but it's good enough!
The Framework Laptop is a truly unique Windows ultraportable that's remarkably repairable and upgradeable. It's basically the anti-MacBook, designed to be easy to upgrade and repair while delivering style and performance without compromise. This is the ultimate DIY laptop.
The Yoga Book 9i is a compelling alternative to foldable screen laptops because you get two 13-inch displays in one package you can use in multiple modes. There are some clever software gestures and multitasking features here, too.
While not the fastest or biggest gaming laptop around, we love the Asus Zephyrus G14 because it can run most games at solid framerates, enough power to get work done in a pinch, and an elegant ultraportable design.
Read more below
The Asus ProArt P16 stands heads and shoulders above the rest as the best for creators — packing the latest AMD power alongside RTX 4070 graphics, a gorgeous 4K OLED touchscreen panel, and a thoughtful aesthetic with ergonomics that keep you in your creative flow.
This Dell XPS 13 differs from the one listed above for two reasons: its Lunar Lake CPU and its gorgeous OLED display. Though its battery life isn’t the greatest and some design elements are off-putting, its astonishing display, solid performance and ultraportable design make up for its flaws.
Tony is a senior staff writer at Tom’s Guide covering everything in the computing world. As a lifelong Windows user, Tony is always seeking the best Windows laptops to recommend to people, especially for those who want an alternative to MacBooks.
The best Windows laptops you can buy right now
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The best Windows laptop overall
The Dell XPS 13 (2024) looks identical to the Dell XPS 13 Plus but it sports a Snapdragon X Elite chip that gives it excellent performance and insanely long battery life (nearly 20 hours in our testing). Right now, it's the longest-lasting consumer laptop we've ever tested at Tom's Guide and one of the best Windows laptops you can buy right now.
If you can get past this laptop's controversial design, which features a function row of capacitive LED-lit keys and no visible touchpad, you'll find a reliable ultraportable that can handle almost anything you throw at it. Its 13.4-inch display delivers good picture quality, and once you get used to the tightly packed keys, you'll find a pleasant typing experience. Best of all, this laptop starts at $1,299, which is an excellent value for what you get.
For all these reasons and more, this is the Windows laptop we recommend most often to those in the market for a new notebook for work, school or play.
Read our full Dell XPS 13 (2024).
The best value
The Acer Aspire Go 15 isn't an amazing laptop, but it doesn't have to be when the asking price is $300. At that price, you can make peace with the fact that the Go 15's low-powered CPU and paltry complement of 8GB RAM and 128GB of storage aren't good for much else besides browsing the web, writing and editing, and maybe some very light gaming.
But that's fine for folks who just need a cheap laptop to browse the web or write emails. What the Acer Aspire Go 15 lacks in features or charm it more than makes up for in utility, as it offers 10 hours of (tested) battery life and a keyboard that's surprisingly comfy to type on. And while its 15.6-inch 1080p screen looks a bit washed-out and won't make colors pop, it's more than good enough for web surfing or working with documents.
The Acer Aspire Go 15 doesn't look, feel or sound as fancy as the other laptops on this list, but it's a serviceable workhorse with a $299 price tag, making it the best Windows laptop for those on a budget and looking for great value.
Read our full Acer Aspire Go 15 review.
The best 2-in-1
The Asus Zenbook 14 Flip OLED has a few key weaknesses, including a disappointing 720p webcam and under ten hours of tested battery life, putting it behind best MacBooks in terms of power efficiency. But if you can live with those drawbacks, you get a lot of great stuff in this Windows 11 2-in-1.
The beautiful 2.8K OLED screen makes whatever you do on it look nice, and the keyboard is comfy and nice to use. Performance is plenty fast, and factor in the svelte and beautiful chassis sporting plenty of ports, and it's a wonder you get all this for $1,199.
If you’re in the market for a dependable 2-in-1 with a svelte design and eye-pleasing OLED panel, this is a great laptop to get!
Read our full Asus Zenbook 14 Flip OLED review.
The best dual-screen 2-in-1
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i unites a pair of beautiful 13.3-inch OLED displays in one device, delivering you a unique laptop that can turn into a variety of unique-looking configurations to fit your needs. This laptop can stand in as a traditional Windows 11 laptop or tablet, plus it can go into tent mode for presentations.
While the design itself can feel a little flimsy and less than sturdy, when you get the hang of using it you may appreciate how versatile and useful this two-screen machine be. Type right on one display or use the separate Bluetooth keyboard to bang out emails on your lap in one screen while you watch movies on the other, and you'll start to appreciate how this laptop starts to feel like a Swiss Army knife.
Though it’s expensive at $1,999, this oddball laptop offers enough singular value to be included in this list.
Read our full Lenovo Yoga 9i review.
The best laptop for DIYers
The Framework Laptop is the anti-MacBook, a modular laptop that promises to let you customize, repair, and upgrade it to an unprecedented degree, all while remaining affordable and ultraportable. Each Framework laptop comes with a screwdriver included, so you can open the case (it's easy, I promise) and replace parts yourself, with everything from the memory to the screen bezel to the mainboard being user-replaceable.
If you're the DIY type and love the idea of being able to tinker with your laptop's innards this is the best laptop for you. The Framework laptop is currently only available for purchase from the Framework website, and the price tag starts at $1,099 — though you can pay as low as $849 for the DIY Edition if you're willing to assemble your laptop yourself and provide your own memory, storage, operating system, and Wi-Fi card.
The best gaming laptop
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 has been one of our favorite gaming laptops for a long time, and the latest model is better than ever thanks to its 3K OLED display.
I like the G14 because it doesn't look so much like a typical gaming laptop, encased as it is in a slick 14-inch ultraportable chassis that has plenty of ports and looks good on a desk.
Sadly, the laptop lasted under 7 hours surfing the web in our battery test and just over an hour while gaming, so it's not got great battery life. But that's to be expected with gaming laptops, and as long as you keep it plugged in while gaming this machine is a lovely little workhorse.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU in our review unit gives it more than enough muscle to play the latest games well, especially if you rely on Nvidia's DLSS upscaling tech, making this the best gaming laptop we recommend most.
Read our full Asus ROG Zephryus G14 review.
The best laptop for creators
The Asus ProArt P16 is a creative powerhouse that puts the 16-inch MacBook Pro on blast. It all starts with a mean-looking matte black aluminum unibody construction, which packs some thoughtful attention to the ergonomics — including a stellar keyboard and touchpad, alongside a DialPad for finite creative control over your projects.
But it all comes together with the display and internals you need for even the most power-hungry workflows. The 4K OLED touchscreen is color calibrated for peak accuracy and confidence in the hues of your work, and that AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 + RTX 4070 combo tears through any intense processing in record time. Battery life may suffer because of it, but if you’re looking for the best laptop to create great content, this is the one to buy.
Read our full Asus ProArt P16 review.
The best OLED Windows laptop
Though other laptops have better performance and battery life, the Dell XPS 13 with a tandem OLED display is the notebook to get if you want the best possible viewing experience on a notebook.
This model features a 13.4-inch tandem OLED display, which we first saw on the iPad Pro M4. The sharp 2,880 x 1,800 resolution allows you to see everything in vivid detail. The OLED tech delivers masterful contrasts between dark and light elements that help images pop off the screen. Though the refresh rate tops out at 60Hz, everything runs smoothly.
The Intel Core Ultra 7 200v “Lunar Lake” chip driving this laptop can deftly handle most everyday tasks like word processing, streaming videos, web surfing and browser-based games. In our testing, Lunar Lake didn’t score as well as other processors like Snapdragon X Elite or Apple M3, which could be a problem if you want to use this Dell XPS 13 for video editing. But if you mostly use a laptop for work and watching videos, you won’t notice any performance issues.
Battery life is one of this laptop’s biggest flaws. It lasts just under nine hours in our testing, which isn’t anywhere close to the 15 or 20 hours we’ve clocked on laptops running M3 or X Elite chips (respectively). The Dell XPS 13 also sports the controversial design of the entire 2024 XPS lineup—meaning this laptop doesn’t feature a physical function row or a visible touchpad. You might also find the tightly packed keys difficult to type on if you have large hands.
While this Dell XPS 13 won’t blow you away with its performance or battery life, its stunning OLED panel makes up for those flaws if you value a laptop’s display above all.
Read our full Dell XPS 13 (Lunar Lake) review.
Also tested
Performance test results compared
CPU speed isn't everything, but putting a number on it can go a long way towards helping you understand exactly how fast a laptop is in relation to the rest of the options available to you.
We test every laptop we review in a number of areas, including CPU performance, so I've taken the liberty of putting together a quick chart here of all the performance scores from the laptops on this list so you can compare them at a glance.
We use Geekbench for these tests, as it assigns each laptop a score for its performance in single-core workloads and multi-core workloads. The single-core score is often a little more meaningful because not all apps are optimized for multi-core performance, but many are so its good to consider multi-core performance as well.
| Laptop | Single-core | Multi-core |
| Dell XPS 13 (2024) | 2797 | 14635 |
| Acer Aspire Go 15 | 1310 | 5209 |
| Asus Zenbook 14 Flip OLED | 2524 | 10540 |
| Framework Laptop | 2362 | 12195 |
| Lenovo Yoga Book 9i | 2317 | 8887 |
| Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 | 2614 | 12246 |
| Asus ProArt P16 | 2872 | 15286 |
| Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra | 2426 | 13061 |
| LG Gram 17 Pro | N/A | N/A |
| Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 | 2809 | 14426 |
Battery benchmarks: comparison
Battery life is one of the key things you should look at when deciding which laptop to buy, which is why we run every laptop we review through a series of battery tests to see how long it lasts on a full charge.
These tests do not reflect real-world use patterns since we have to set every laptop to the same settings in order to do fair comparisons. Thus, while the times listed here are accurate and useful as a comparison point, your own experience with a laptop's battery life will likely vary.
This is because when we run our battery test we set the laptop's display to 150 nits of brightness and have it endlessly browse the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. However, when you use your laptop you're likely adjusting brightness on the fly, doing all sorts of different tasks while perhaps listening to music or watching a video at the same time, and generally putting the machine through more of a workout than it gets in our test.
So while I stand by our testing and the battery life results we compare in the chart below, I want to be clear that your own experience will vary!
| Laptop | Battery life (tested) |
| Dell XPS 13 (2024) | 19:41 |
| Acer Aspire Go 15 | 10:15 |
| Asus Zenbook 14 Flip OLED | 8:24 |
| Lenovo Yoga Book 9i | 9:18 (two displays) | 12:13 (one display) |
| Framework Laptop | 10:17 |
| Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 | 11:15 |
| Asus ProArt P16 | 9:32 |
| Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra | 13:19 |
| LG Gram 17 Pro | 12:02 |
| Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 | 15:44 |
How to choose the best laptop for you
How to choose the best Windows laptop for you
Performance: If performance isn't important to you, say because you only need a laptop for browsing the web, you can save a lot of money by choosing a cheap Windows laptop with an Intel Core i3 processor or weaker and 4-8 GB of RAM, like the Acer Aspire Go 15. But if speed and performance are important to you, pick a laptop with starting specs such as a better CPU, 8-16 GB of RAM and at least a 512GB SSD, like the XPS 13.
Size: Consider how mobile you want your Windows machine to be. Notebooks like the Dell XPS 13 are incredibly light and slim, while gaming-focused laptops like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 have real heft to them but offer real power in exchange.
Flexibility: The 2-in-1 category of Windows laptop is a relatively new but exciting market of devices with hinges capable of rotating all the way around to lay the screen flat on the back of the laptop, turning it into a Windows tablet. If the idea of having a laptop that doubles as a tablet is exciting to you, Windows notebooks like the Lenovo Yoga 9i are a great choice.
Graphics and gaming: Most Windows laptops feature integrated graphics as part of the CPU, which means they can handle old or undemanding games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, but they won't be great at running the latest games or any intensive graphics applications (think: photo and video editing). For that, you'll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.
Whatever system you choose, it's always a good idea to complement it by investing in the best mouse for your particular work situation.
How we tested these laptops
How we test to find the best Windows laptops
The best Windows laptops rise to the top in our lab tests, in which we run every machine through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use.
For example, we carefully measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop's display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. To evaluate overall performance we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 5 (CPU performance), as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine's hard drive is, and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.
When testing all laptops we benchmark gaming performance running Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm. For testing dedicated gaming laptops, we also run benchmarks for a number of other popular games, such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2.
All of these lab tests are complemented by our hands-on review process, in which reviewers spend time putting each laptop through its paces while working, watching movies, listening to music, and playing games.
For more information on our testing process, check out our guide to how we test products at Tom's Guide.
