Laptops Arena

Who says you have to pay a fortune to buy a good laptop? It's true, if you are looking for a computer to play good games with, then you will have to come up at least $2000 if you want to satisfy your hunger for F.E.A.R. or Jericho. If you need a laptop that will allow you to surf the internet, work with documents and do some other things like watch movies, edit pictures or listen to music, then you don't need a powerful machine. We will try to find out for you which is the best laptop under $400.

With a starting price of $300, you can get a Compaq Presario CQ61Z laptop which is cute, simple and not to mention cheap. The nice thing is it uses Windows 7 which is the latest operating system meant to squeeze the juice out of your computer. It has a 15.6 inch display which means you don't have to stare at the screen as you would if you bought a 10 inch netbook. On HP's website, you can customize your laptop to make it as cheap as possible. You get to choose between different AMD processors. You can get 2, 3 or 4 GB of RAM for your laptop and the size of the hard disk is also up to you (HP website offers 4 choices: 160, 250, 320 and 500 GB of HDD). As for the graphics card, you can choose between the simple ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics with 128MB display cache memory  and you can add a 5-in-1 digital media reader and a HDMI port. You can choose between the regular double-layer DVD burner or the Blue-Ray ROM. All models have an integrated microphone but you can also choose the model that has a webcam. You have one year warranty no matter which configuration you choose.



One very good choice is the Toshiba L505-S5984 laptop which has good specs considering its $399 price. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 processor which is quite unexpected at this price. Due to its 16 inch display, this laptop is a good desktop replacement and don't have to stare at the screen to see what's going on. Because it's bigger, it also has a numerical pad which is priceless for people that work with spreadsheets. You get 3 GB of RAM which means multiple tasking should not be a problem. You will need to run Windows Vista or Windows 7 in order to get the best out of all you RAM as Windows XP might run a bit slow and the applications will take longer to launch. You can upgrade up to 8 GB of RAM but we don't think this is necessary because this is not a gaming notebook. The main reason why you can't play any games with it is the weak graphics card. The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD is no video devil so no 3D applications for you either. The built in webcam is not that great but you can get good video images in a properly lit environment. It seems that most machines come with Windows 7 and other preinstalled software, like anti-virus trial programs. If you think the 250 GB of free disk space is not enough to store all your files, documents, music, pictures, games and applications, you can always use the dual-layer DVD drive to make DVD copies of all your files and then clear up some disk space. We think this is the best laptop under $400 that you could ever find.

Of course, there is also the "other" option. You can always choose a refurbished laptop as they are a good investment. Refurbished laptops are laptops that have already been used and they were returned because of minor flaws. The company does a technical review to try to determine what was wrong with that particular unit and after fixing all the problems, it is resold at a much lower price. The disadvantage of refurbished laptops is that you have shorter warranty period (usually half the period of the brand new laptop) and you have less time to return it. If a new laptop can be returned in 90 days, you only have about 30 days to return a refurbished one.



For $400 you can buy the refurbished HP 530. The processor is an Intel Celeron M420 which has a speed of 1.6 GHz. You will get your unit with 512 MB RAM but you can upgrade to a maximum of 2 GB. In case 80 GB of free space are not enough to store all your files, you can always make DVD copies using the double layer DVD burner. The graphics card is an Intel GMA 950 which means you can't really play any games either. Even if the design is classic this laptop does not look cheap. There are aspects which won't make you very happy. For example this laptop only has 2 x USB ports which are both on the left side so if you want to attach a mouse you will probably stumble across the keyboard. The battery life is also very weak and the laptop probably shut down after 1 hour and 10 minutes if you use the laptop at maximum intensity. However if you are a modest laptop user you will get along with the HP 530 just fine. We recommend you check out some other refurbished laptops because you are bound to find some better models at lower costs. The price of this laptops are different from store to store and since the Christmas Holidays are coming you will find some really good offers.



Out of all the models we have presented in this article we thing Toshiba is by far the best cheap laptop under $400 that money can buy. It has good specs and it's also made by one of the world's most famous laptop manufactures. If you are willing to spell another $100-$200 you can find even better laptop models that have more powerful components. It all depends on what you are going to use the laptop for. If all you have to do is basic computing then $00 should be enough money to spend on a laptop.