Let’s look at budget notebooks. For most of us, struggling students, workaday writers, web designers and graphic artists just trying to pay the bills, it really is our budget that determines what notebook we’re going to get.
When it comes to general use, depending on how much you can afford to spend, there’s more or less a “top notebook” within that price range. So we’ll list the very best you can hope to get in each one of these price ranges…
Under $100
The Mead 70 page college ruled notebook is probably your best bet if you have less than a hundred bucks to spend. Make sure to set aside two bucks for some bic pens.
Okay but seriously, the hundred dollar laptop we’ve been hearing so much about… well, think “Two hundred dollar laptop” and you’ll be closer to the price they settled on.
Under $300
Five hundred dollars is usually the starting price for any halfway decent laptops, but believe it or not, there are a few available for under three hundred. Don’t waste your time shopping around, though, this is probably the best one: the 500 MHz-600 MHz G3 dual USB iBook.
This is going for around two hundred bucks. It’s not the most powerful system on the market, but let’s look at what it can do. It runs OSX 10.4 Tiger, and it can handle Photoshop Elements 4.0. It’s not what you want if you’re into video editing, hardcore gaming, or serious graphic arts, but the fact remains that it gets the job done for about the price of a month’s worth of groceries.
Under $600
If you’ve got about five hundred dollars to spend, you have a lot more options. What you want to do is focus specifically on what you need a laptop for. If you want a GREAT laptop for editing video, you can definitely have it for under six hundred bucks, but… don’t expect it to do much else.
Probably the best general purpose laptop in the five hundred dollar range is the Acer Aspire 3100. It comes with an AMD 3500 processor, 1gb DDR2 (which isn’t bad for this price range), an 80GB hard drive (hey, that’s better than a lot of home computers), a DVDR drive, and a 15.4 inch display. Basically, it will handle gaming, it will handle video editing, graphic design, etcetera etcetera, all pretty well. It won’t blow you away or anything, but it’s up to par on pretty much all fronts, and you should be able to get it for somewhere between four and five hundred dollars.
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There are lots of laptops and netbooks for less than $500 that will suit most users. If a laptop is just needed for word processing, internet and email, there are many options.
Asus EEE
Acer One
E-Machines Laptops -not the best quality
From BestBuy.com
Compaq CQ60-215DX
Compaq CQ60-211DX
Acer AS5735-4950
Toshiba L305-S5917
and that’s just a few of them. For most users, these would be fine. If you’re into gaming, web design, graphic design or music production, you likely wouldn’t be looking for units like this!