Laptops, once considered a computing luxury, are now the norm, outselling their bulkier desktop counterparts for the last two years. And as notebooks have increased in popularity they have steadily decreased in price. As recently as a few years ago, the average cost of a portable PC still hovered around $1,500. Nowadays, drop by any big box electronics store and you’ll be hard pressed to find more than a handful of laptops with price tags in excess of $1,000.

Indeed, the question for most budget conscious laptop shoppers these days isn’t so much whether a notebook PC is affordable, but rather how inexpensive dare a person go?

Excluding the relatively new genus of the “netbook”— astoundingly inexpensive ($300 to $500) sub-notebooks that eschew features once considered indispensable, such as optical drives, full-sized keyboards, and hard disks — there are plenty of traditional, full-featured notebooks available in the $500 to $700 range. But are these machines so technologically eviscerated that they won’t be able to meet your basic productivity requirements?

To help find the answer we’ve put together a little comparison of five bargain notebooks currently available from mainstream manufacturers.

Dell Inspiron 1525 ($499) - www.dell.ca
The cheapest traditional notebook we could find, the Dell Inspiron 1525 starts at just $500 less a buck. Why so inexpensive? Rest assured that it’s not because Dell is simply undercutting the competition. It’s the only laptop in this group to feature a single-core processor — Intel’s 2.0 GHz Celeron 550.

In the current computing climate this is sort of like a dodo sighting as mono-core CPUs are pretty much extinct these days. It’s not an ideal processing solution for the 1525’s pre-installed operating system, Windows Vista Home Basic, nor is it recommended if you need to do much in the way of multitasking. What’s more, the machine’s built-in wireless supports only the aging 802.11g standard. It has a nice big 15.4-inch 1280-by-800 display, but it’s powered by a meagre 4-cell battery, so don’t expect too much operating time.

The rest of the hardware — 1 GB of RAM, a CD burner/DVD player, and an 80 GB hard drive — runs along the lines of other bargain laptops, and you can choose from a wide selection of case colours and patterns.

Still, it’s among the lowest-power laptop you can buy. Unless you really need the optical drive and larger screen, best invest $150 more and upgrade to one of Dell’s dual-core Inspirons (or save yourself a little cash — and weight — and just go with a netbook).

HP Compaq Presario CQ50-100CA ($550) - www.hp.ca
Fifty bucks more buys you this Compaq Presario from HP, which offers plenty of worthwhile perks, beginning with a dual-core AMD Athlon X2 processor that runs at 1.9 GHz, which ought to make running multiple applications simultaneously a little less of a hair-pulling experience. Plus, 2 GB of RAM and discrete graphics in the form of an NVIDIA GeForce 8200M card let the QC50-100CA function as a (very) modest gaming machine (think Civilization III, not IV).

What’s more, a boost from Windows Vista Home Basic to Home Premium adds features such as the operating system’s ballyhooed Aero interface, as well as handy multimedia apps such as Movie Maker and DVD Maker. You’ll also get a 160 GB hard drive, a webcam and an optical drive that burns DVDs. In other words, $50 buys plenty. There’s no choice in case styles, but that’s a negligible complaint. If your budget is capped at five-and-a-half bills, you’re not likely to do much better.

Next: The other contenders

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