Notebooks at Netbook Prices: How Low Can We Go?

A Bird's Eye View of Sub-$500 Laptops

ASUS and the Eee PC deserve a large portion of the credit for many of the current trends we see with inexpensive laptops. All netbooks must pay homage in part to the Eee PC, and ASUS managed to show the market that there's a large number of people who are interested in laptops that are merely "fast enough" - provided they are also very affordable. Four years ago, inexpensive laptops often had major compromises in the features department - especially when it came to not providing enough memory. While there are still plenty of 2GB laptops available and some would say that's not quite enough, the reality is that we've plateaued and many users are perfectly happy running moderate dual-core machines and 2GB of memory. If you're looking for something similar in an inexpensive mobile computer, your choices boil down to a few general areas.

We will leave the netbook coverage for another date, but at the low end of the pricing spectrum (+/- $300) there are a ton of netbooks available. These pretty much all use the Intel Atom processors, and a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU is roughly the equivalent of a 1.2GHz Pentium M (state-of-the-art circa 2003). Even though you might have more memory these days (most notebooks come with 1GB RAM now), there are definitely limitations to what you can do with such a system. The true benefits are their small size and often very good battery life. These systems also ship with Windows XP for the most part, which is definitely a better fit than Vista for a 1GB system. There was a time when any laptop smaller than 12" carried a huge price premium, and the netbook has virtually single-handedly killed that market. At the very least, small laptop prices have dropped dramatically.

The next step up from netbooks should cost under $400. These are sometimes older ~15.4" laptops on clearance, or they might be slightly newer designs that try to keep costs as low as possible. You usually get a single-core processor running at around 2GHz. Remember the old Athlon 64 3200+ from October 2003? Imagine updating that CPU to a more recent 65nm process technology (sometimes even 45nm) with a few other tweaks and you won't be far off. The interesting thing is that such systems are still more than fast enough to do 95% of what people need, especially if they have enough memory. If netbooks are "fast enough", a single-core 2GHz Athlon 64/Pentium M style processor is often 60% faster (or more!) than the Intel Atom N280, so outside of gaming and other CPU/GPU intensive tasks such a system shouldn't have any problems. Most of these laptops will come with Vista Home Basic, a more limited version of Windows Vista though it keeps many of the core features. Keep your eye out for special offers, i.e. the Best Buy and Wal-Mart $300 laptops, and just don't expect the equivalent of a $1000+ laptop. Try before you buy if at all possible, since things like the keyboard and screen are difficult to judge without hands-on time.

If you still need more power, another $100 can get you a ~2GHz dual-core processor (twice the theoretical performance) along with upgraded integrated graphics. Casual gaming titles like Sims 3 should run on these systems, although probably not at the native LCD resolution (1280x800 or 1366x768) and at low detail settings. Most $500 laptops will also come with Windows Vista Home Premium, and we would recommend trying to get the 64-bit version along with a laptop that includes 4GB RAM. You can also choose between 14" and 15.4"/15.6" laptops, so somewhat less bulky options are available. These laptops should easily last another 5+ years, provided they don't break and you don't change your computing demands. While both AMD and Intel-based systems exist in this category, there's no getting around the fact that the AMD laptops have better features for the same price. This usually consists of more memory and better integrated graphics, and while Intel definitely has the fastest processors around right now with the Core i7 line, the low-end Pentium Dual-Core chips are nothing to write home about. Clock for clock, Intel and AMD are very similar in the low-end markets, so the other features become a lot more meaningful. Remember to pay attention to battery capacity; most of these laptops have extremely similar components, so twice the battery capacity equates to twice the battery life. An extra $50 for a higher capacity battery definitely improves the mobility aspect of these notebooks.

We haven't tested any of the laptops in this article, but we tried to stick to options that have a reasonable reputation online. We are working on getting manufacturers to send us laptops that cater to what our readers actually buy as opposed to simply sending us the biggest, fastest desktop replacement notebooks. We will continue to look at that market segment as well, but there's no getting around the fact that most laptops sell in the sub-$1000 price range. Finally, we had a hard limit of $500 for all the notebooks listed in this article; as is always the case, spending more money will open up additional options. Most of the options are incremental upgrades to what we've already discussed, so you can decide whether an extra 10% CPU performance and perhaps a discrete GPU make sense.

There is one laptop we do want to mention, however: the Acer Aspire 13.3" Timeline. For just $50 more than our price limit, the Timeline claims to provide up to eight hours of battery life (reportedly around 7 hours in moderate usage scenarios). You get an Intel Pentium SU2700 1.3GHz processor (single-core, 45nm, 2MB L2, 1.30GHz, 800MHz FSB), so performance is actually going to be closer to netbooks, but 4GB DDR3 memory, 320GB HDD, Vista Home Premium 64-bit, 802.11N WiFi, Gigabit Ethernet, and an LED backlit 1366x768 LCD are all good features. Note also that there is no optical drive on the 13.3" models (the 14" and 15.6" models include a DVDRW), and Acer envisions it as an alternative to the MacBook Air. This is about one third the price of the MacBook Air with similar battery life, which is great, but the Timeline's CPU is also far slower than the Air's default Core 2 Duo SL9400 (dual-core, 45nm, 6MB shared L2, 1.86GHz, 1066MHz FSB). We hope to have the Timeline in for review shortly.