Chuwi LapBook 14.1

First Apollo Lake Powered Laptop
Follow Buy the Chuwi Lapbook 14.1
8.2

Great

7.7

User Avg

Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 Review Online

Chuwi Lapbook 14.1 Review Online

Second time’s a charm for Chuwi’s Lapbook, the Lapbook 14.1 proves to be one of the best budget laptops around, but it’s still not perfect. Below is my video review of the Chuwi Lapbook 14.1. There will be a write-up and rating soon, but for now, everythings covered in this video review:

Bottom line: It’s a great laptop, just has one major issue. Thermals, yet again we see a passively cooled chipset getting far too hot gaming. Luckily I do have a fix for this. My thermal mod works a treat on this notebook lowering max temps around 20 degrees, by just adding a 20 x 20 x 1 copper shim, removing the heat shielding black pad on top of the metal shield/heatsink and adding a 2mm thick thermal pad. Works a treat and the bottom hardly heats up at all!

Performance can be further increased by adding an SSD in the M.2 slot and using this as the boot drive (Windows will need to be cloned to the drive or reinstalled to the SSD).

Video tech reviewer and tech blogger. I have a huge interest in the latest tech, tablets, laptops, mobiles, drones, and even e-scooters. Active in the tech community since 2008 days of the Omnia i900 Windows phone. Samsungi8910omnia.com, Samsunggalaxysforums.com founder from way back.

51 Comments

  1. Hey Guys,

    My lapbook has trouble booting after I installed an M.2 SSD, and did a clean install of Windows 10. Now, when I press power, I just get a loop of the Chuwi logo and the Laptop can’t seem to find a boot device. I have set the SSD to position 1 in BIOS, and disabled all other devices but it still struggles to boot. If I press F7, the SSD is the first bootable device in the list, and if I select it, the computer will boot straight away. Any ideas?

    Thanks in advance.

    • If it’s listed in the bios it should work, it’s a sata3 one right, not PCIe? Save and check the boot order.

    • I’d suggest installing rEFInd, it’s pretty useful for helping with boot problems. Then install easyefi or easyuefi (I forget name).

      • Cheers Paul, I will try when I get home from work and report back.

      • Hi,

        I tried both those programs, with no luck. But, I did read on the Chuwi forum, from a user who’s Lapbook was displaying some of the same symptoms, and a Bios update fixed it. I now have a copy of the update and will install and report back.

        Cheers.

        • So,I’ve installed the Bios update and all seems good. Will keep an eye on it over the next few days, but I’m confident it’s sorted.

  2. What’s about screen flicker / PWM on Low brighless ?

  3. HEY THERE !I love your channel and have had watched most of your reviews ) I have question . do you think this laptop will handle some light 2d autocad working for school ?l ?considering the processor performance more like an old 2 core ( with HT) i5 second gen .

    • Hi, if it’s light work I think it will handle it. But only if you’re done the thermal mod or it might get too hot.

  4. I’ve heard varying reviews about the trackpad. Is it good or is it the weak point of this laptop

    • Hi,
      I have found some kind of delay, specially when I stop moving my finger I notice that el mouse pointer keeps moving a little bit. Also scroll gesture does not work when moving slowly. You need to move two fingers fast in order to get scroll done.
      Touchpad uses standard Windows 10 mouse driver.
      I don’t think that touchpad is good enough compared to the overall quality of the laptop.
      IMHO, touchpad and camera are the weak points.
      In regard the camera, it seems that it is a 2MP camera, but some applications (Windows 10 camera app, skype and hangouts) use it at 640×480@30fps, others (VLC, Filmora) can also work at 1280×720@5fps and higher resolutions, but only at 5fps.

      I think that these problems could be fixed with driver updates/specific drivers.
      I do not believe Chuwi will do it.

  5. Hi Chris,
    Thanks for the nice review. How this laptop performs when we compare to Intel I3 or I5? is its too slow when we compare to Intel I3 or i5 chipset?
    Also is its possible to install Mac Os on this laptop?
    One more question, can we still use 64 eMC storage, if we install external SSD chip.
    It would be great help, if you can answer these questions. Thanks.

  6. Thanks for yr. reviews and tips. I still have an annoying problem with randomly unmounting of SD card on this Chuwi Lapbook 14.1. SD card is 128Gb Lexar 1000x UHS-II. . No clue of what is wrong with it. I reinstalled original drivers twice, disabled all energy saving options, etc. , no way.
    Did anybody find a solution?

    • Anything in the windows event logs?

      • I opened it (unfortunately all events are given in my language) : what should I look for ?(sorry if my question sounds silly)

        • hopefully you should see the event recording the card being ejected and inserted, so look a few events before and after.

          Is there anything in the hardware events log, suggesting a fault? it might cause the driver to reset the device?

          or indication of a power management event, even if you disabled power saving?

          • Yess, I found some (repeated) error(s) but nothing explicitely relayed for a disk ejection event. I’ll copy and paste the description (it’s almost in English).

          • The only event marked as error , just coming up at start-up, is identified with id #10016, but nothing related apparently to a disk ejection. could it be a factory defect?

          • maybe you can take a screen shot, post it to imgur.com and post the link?

            can you test the card in a USB card reader instead, just in case the card occasionally glitches?

          • The fix is here: https://techtablets.com/chuwi-lapbook-14-1/downloads/ just update the realtek driver.

    • Nothing yet for this. I think we may need a bios update to fix it. I’ve noticed that some cards don’t seem to do it as often as others.

      • Awesome, Chris!. Thank you so much! I installed then executed the roll back to that version of driver and now, after three days without that annoying unmounting/remounting of sd card, I am very happy of my CHUWI. Now it works as expected.

  7. Hello, I have a battery that runs out quickly.
    For the first two three hours seems normal, then suddenly it goes to 7%, and turns off after a while.
    Do you think is the bad battery?

    • I think you’ve been unlucky, premature battery failure. Can you get them to send a replacement rather than have to swap the entire lapbook?

    • Try this, power it back on after it turns off at 7% (More likely it’s only at about 60%) keep running it until it powers off, try again to power it on, keep doing this untill it will no longer power on. Then let it charge overnight the battery should now be correctly calibrated. If that doesn’t fix it it’s a hardware fault of sorts. My lapbook I have run from 100% to powering off and got 8 hours out of it.

  8. Nice review. ‘Bit of a silly question, but are the ‘Chuwi’ logos printed on the case plastic? (meaning, can they be easily removed?)

    Also, where did you get the copper bit?

    Cheers.

    • It’s printed or painted on there. Maybe some paint stripper could get it off. I got the copper shims from eBay.co.uk.

  9. One of the big reason I like those value Chinese Tablet/Laptops because normally they would have every BIOS settings unlocked and tweakable to user, and thus I can tweak the machine to my liking which is very nice.

    Wondering what sort of BIOS features it has?

    • This one is locked down it seems. No options at all! Unless I’m missing something like an option to show all options.

      • I’ve a Toshiba Click Mini (Baytrail Z3735F). There’s almost no UEFI firmware options at all, all you can do is set the date and time, and turn secure boot on or off.

  10. p.s. I’d be delighted if you could boot linux just to see what works.

    • I can’t get it to boot, maybe the issue is Apollo Lake support, just boots and freezes up with an underscore being displayed on the top left of the screen.

      • thanks very much for even trying. I’ll hold off and let some braver person experiment!

  11. a great review. I’m tempted to get this for my son.

  12. It is equal to a copper thickness 15x15x1mm replacing 20x20x1mm used by you?

    • 15 x 15 x 1mm will also work just fine. Maybe less risk too in shorts from the surrounding components.

      • so to get the most decrease temperature…in safety, advise me to use 15mm or 20mm? Thank’s

  13. Seems like a great buy. The only possible contender seems Onda xiaoma 41. But it looks very similar to this Chuwi, but it seems it has bigger touchpad. What are your expectations of Onda? Don’t you plan to buy one? It’s already available on aliexpress, geekbuying.

    Thanks

    • I’ll get one, often Onda’s build quality is very hit and miss, which is why I tend not to review their tablets.

  14. Chris – what m.2 keys does it socket take?.(useally vital to know since the brand often dont inform about it in specs and the actual m.2 socket standard, I doubt it handles generation3) anyway i do recall you have an generation3 M.2, as in your samsung 960 with KeyM.. to my understanding these m.2 tablet sockets is only KeyB and KeyM/B valid.

    you got any info on this. as mention’ its oftn quite vital if people looking to suit there socket up with an m.2 NGFF card, that they end up with the correct m.2 key.

    • Hi, Sata3 M.2 spec. It does not support PCIe/NVMe as far as I can tell. Sizes 22 x 42 works fine 2260 might work, but the more common 2280 wouldn’t.

  15. Good work as always. Keep ’em coming!

  16. You’re doing fast and good work. Thank you.

    • This one was a bit faster than normal as I’m flying out of the country today. The rest will be edited and uploaded later on. And then a quite write-up and rating for them too.

  17. Thanks you for the review and please keep up the great work!

Comments are now closed for this post.

Lost Password

Skip to toolbar