Laptops Arena

When you are on the market looking for a cheap notebook computer, maybe you would like to take a look at the new mini notebook released by MSI – the Wind U160. At a price of $429 for the unit reviewed, this cheap notebook computer is surely a great choice not only when you are looking to save some money, but it is ideal when you are on the market searching for a portable unit which is easy to carry around no matter where you travel.
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And the MSI Wind U160 is definitely something portable since it comes with 10.24 x 7.09 x 0.74 inches in dimensions and 2.4 pounds in weight. This unit comes with the most common choice for processors when it comes to mini notebooks: an Intel Atom. The unit is based on a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N450 processor and 1 GB of RAM. The graphics card is the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 and the total storage capacity of the hard drive is 250 GB. The unit is shipped with the 32 bit version of the Windows 7 Starter Edition operating system. MSI says that the battery life will keep this cheap notebook computer on for no less than 15 hours. Stick with us to learn if that information is accurate. In the mean time, let me tell you that this portable notebook comes with a 10.1 inch display that comes at a native resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels.

If we were to compare this display with other similarly sized and priced notebooks, we have to admit that the MSI Wind is below the category average. There is some backlight bleeding and this is not good news for any notebook display. Since the screen is covered in a glossy coating, the colors appear sharper and more vibrating, making the image to appear as if it was of a superior quality. The MSI Wind U160 does not offer much when it comes to the selection of ports and connections but it does come with a couple of ports that could come in handy at a certain point. The laptop is host to 3 USB ports, one SDHC media card reader, the Ethernet port, a Kensington lock slot, one VGA out and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks.



The battery performance is an extremely important chapter when it comes to 10.1 inch notebook that are supposed to stay on for hours of long continuous usage since they are not designed to let you down in your moments of need. Like we said at the beginning of the article, MSI says that the Wind U160 can stay on for 15 continuous hours on a full charge. Of course, that would be a dream come true for many people. During the performed battery drain test, the Wind U160 manages to stay on for 8 hours and 21 minutes which is still a great performance level when we consider the fact that there are lot of mini laptop that cannot reach the 8 hour performance.

When you are on the market looking for cheap laptops, you should know that if you really want to save some money, you have to keep in mind that refurbished models are a great way to save some money since they come with quite a big price difference compared to the brand new models. Another thing that you must always remember is that cheap laptop generally come with rather weak components so don’t expect to buy powerful units if you are not willing to spend more than $500.
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But if it’s cheap laptops what the public wants, it’s cheap laptops what the public gets and we are going to show some examples of very affordable systems. www.geeks.com is a great website that provides you with a lot of possibilities for you to choose from and get the laptop that suit you best at a price that is definitely not going to make a hole in your budget. The first such example is that of a very good netbook, the Lenovo IdeaPad S10.

This mini laptop has a display that measures 10.1 inches in diagonal and it comes at a native resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The processor of this unit is the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 and 1 GB of RAM with the possibility to extend it to a maximum 2 GB. The total storage capacity of the hard drive is 160 GB. There is no optical drive attached to the unit since this has to be sacrificed in order to get a thin and light system. The graphics card is the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. This mini laptop includes the Ericsson 3G Broadband Modem which can be used only when you have a SIM card plus a suitable data plan. The included media card reader supports Secure Digital, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro and MultiMedia Card formats. As for the selection of ports and features, this laptop offers 2 USB ports, one Ethernet jack, a VGA out and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks.  The preinstalled operating system that is shipped with this unit is Windows XP Home.



If you are looking for a notebook which is just slight bigger and more powerful, for $650 you can buy the Sony VAIO VGN-NW240F/S laptop that comes with a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor and 4 GB of RAM with the possibility to extend to a maximum 8 GB of RAM. The total storage capacity of the hard drive is 320 GB, quite enough to make this laptop even your primary computer. The graphics card is the integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 45. Other features that may determine you to buy this laptop are the 15.5 inch display with a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels or the included Motion Eye webcam with an integrated microphone. The unit will be shipped with the 64 bit version of the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. As for the selection of ports and features, this unit comes with 3 USB ports, one Ethernet port, a HDMI port, a VGA out, a FireWire port and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks.

A cheap notebook is no longer a thing of the past. Customers are more and more oriented towards saving money and so they always try to find the best deals, such as notebook discount, coupons that offer special prices or holiday promotions when laptops are much cheaper. We are going to give you cheap notebook examples as some models are cheap right from the beginning so you don’t have to go haunting for special offers and discounts.

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The Gateway EC1430u is one very good choice as it has a starting price of $550. The unit has a 1.3 GHz Intel Pentium SU 4100 processor and 3 GB of RAM. The hard drive can store up to 320 GB and so far, the specs are pretty good for a budget laptop. Too bad that the graphics card is the weak integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500 MHD. The unit will most likely come with the preinstalled version of the 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

For less than $600, you can buy the Acer Aspire 5740-6378, a 15.6 inch budget notebook which has quite good performance considering its price tag. The unit is powered by a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 15-430M processor and 4 GB of RAM. This combination between RAM and CPU is going to provide great system speed and opportunity of running multiple task at the same time without having to wait around too long to switch between tabs and windows.

The storage capacity of the hard drive is 320 GB and the graphics card is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 with 1 GB of video memory. We would have never imagined that a notebook this cheap would come with components that good inside. The 15.6 inch display has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels and it comes with an integrated DVD burner and the 64 bit version of the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system preinstalled.

$799 is the price of the Asus UL30A-A1, a cheap notebook which is remarkable because of its keyboard which is very similar to that of the Apple MacBook laptop. The Asus UL30A-A1 runs on a 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300 processor and 4 GB of RAM. To our surprise, even if the display measures only 13.1 inches in diagonal, the native resolution of the screen is 1366 x 768 pixels, the same as the one on the 15.6 inch Acer Aspire described above. The storage capacity of the hard disk has reached 500 GB which means you don’t have to worry about running out of free disk space too soon. Hopefully you won’t because there is no included optical drive on this ultra portable notebook.

The graphics card is the Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500 MHD and the unit will come with the 32 bit version of the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system preinstalled. You could also look into the Acer Aspire AS1410 which is available for a starting price of $450 and it has a 1.2 GHz Intel Celeron SU 2300 processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive and the Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500 MHD.

Cheap mini notebooks are a real bargain when you think about the maximum of portability that they offer. They are compact sized and very light so you can throw them in a bag or purse and take them to work or school or even on trips anytime you like. Another thing that people love is that cheap mini notebooks are very easy to find and you have a wide range of products to choose from.  There are a lot of famous manufacturers like Dell, Toshiba, Acer, Asus or Sony which produce mini notebooks.

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An example of a good and cheap netbook is the Asus EEE PC 701 which can be bought for $399 and it has good specs when you consider that mini notebooks or netbooks like some people like to call them are dedicated mainly for surfing the internet and working on documents. There is not very much to talk about when it comes to the specs of a mini notebook.

Compared to other netbooks which generally use Intel Atom processors, the Asus EEE 701 runs on a 900 MHz Intel Celeron processor and 512 MB of RAM. Unfortunately, some people may find it annoying that the hard drive can only support 4 GB of files. The graphics card is integrated and it only has 64 MB of video memory which means no game play on this unit.

The 701 is a super small notebook as it has a display which measures only 7 inches in diagonal and it has a native resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The unit hosts 3 USB ports, one Ethernet port, a modem port, an SD memory card reader and the headphone plus microphone jacks.

For $330, you can buy the Acer Aspire One D250, another high quality netbook which has made its users very happy. This unit runs on a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1 GB of RAM. The total storage space is 160 GB so this is one aspect which is in favor of the D250 if we compare it to the Asus EEE PC 701. The graphics card is also an integrated one which takes shape in the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. The screen is 10.1 inches in diagonal and it has a native resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels.

As for the selection of ports and connections, the unit comes with 3 USB ports, one VGA out, an Ethernet port, a 5-in-1 media card reader and the headphones plus microphone jack. The unit also has a 0.3 integrated webcam which can be found above the display but the quality of the images during video calls is not very appealing.

The battery life of this laptop does not offer any amazing performance as we generally expect netbooks which are ultra portables to last turned on quite a lot when they are away from a power outlet. If you enable the wireless card, turn the display brightness to 70% and set the Windows XP power management profile to “power saver” you will get about 2 hours and 30 minutes of battery life. Quite disappointing, isn’t it?

We have written a lot of articles about cheap laptops with really low prices so writing about very cheap laptops can be a challenge. As usual, we did our homework and found some extremely cheap models which we are going to present today.
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www.cheaplaptopsusa.com is the website which sells very cheap laptops. In fast the prices are so low we were beginning to wonder if maybe there is something wrong with these models. But then we found out they came with one month warranty. The laptops found on this website are really old so the specs are very weak and in my opinion they are pretty useless if you consider the kind of applications we need to run on our computer these days. From what I saw, there are only 3 laptop models available on this website. First you have the Dell Latitude which has a 0.233 GHz processor, 6 GB of storage capacity and 64 MB of RAM memory. Another model is the Compaq Armada M700 with a 0.75 GHZ processor, 40 GB of free disk space and 192 MB of RAM. Compared to the Latitude it has a DVD optical drive while the Dell has only a CD optical drive. The Compaq runs with the Windows 98 operating system while the Dell ran with the Windows 2003 operating system. The price of the Dell is $99 while the Armada is $149. As you can see, there laptops really can’t handle all the pressure we apply to our modern laptops so let’s check out some more decent laptops on other websites.

On www.nextag.com there are some great offers for both new and refurbished laptops. For $268 you can buy the new Acer Gateway LT2021u netbook. it is powered by a 1.0 GHz Intel Pentium III processor and 1 GB of RAM. It has a hard disk capacity of 160 GB and it runs with the Windows XP Home operating system. The display is 10.1 inches and the whole unit weighs only 2.6 so this is an ideal laptop for people that need a portable unit to help them meet the basic computing needs. If you want a more decent laptop, you can get the HP Presario CQ50-115NR refurbished for as low as $400. It runs with a 2.0 GHz AMD Turion X2 Dual Core processor and 3 GB of RAM. The capacity of the hard drive is 200 GB and the graphics card is an nVidia GeForce 8200M with a maximum of 1407 MB of video memory. It has a 15.4 inch display with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels.



This models has 3 USB ports, a 5-in-1 digital media card reader, one VGA port, one Ethernet jack, one phone jack, one Kensington lock slot ad one headphone plus one microphone jack. It also comes with a 3 month warranty for the skeptical people that don’t trust refurbished laptops. Another nice feature is the dual layer DVD burner and I think the price and performance balance with this laptop is pretty acceptable.