Low cost laptops
Offerings of low cost laptops are popping up in various places. However, they are in limited supply and soon sell out. For example, CNET reported that Best Buy had a 15″ Acer for $299 with these specs:
An AMD Athlon 64 processor, 15.6-inch WXGA display, 2GB DDR2 memory, DVD-RW drive, 160GB hard disk drive, ATI Radeon Xpress 1200 graphics, 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition.
But the offer quickly sold out. Now CNET reports that Wal-Mart is offering the following:
Starting July 26 (this coming Sunday), Wal-Mart will begin selling a $298 Compaq Presario notebook (CQ60-419WM) with the following specifications: a 15.6-inch display, 3GB of memory, a 160GB hard-disk drive, a CD-DVD drive, and Windows Vista pre-loaded. The laptop will use a 2.10 GHz AMD Sempron SI-42 processor and Nvidia GeForce 8200M graphics.
Again the quantities are limited. The laptop is said to come with Vista installed but I couldn’t find which version. I assume that, like the Best Buy offer, Vista Home Basic is what you get. And therein lies a catch. Home Basic is not to be confused with Home Premium; it is really basic with no fancy graphics. And, if I understand correctly, Home Basic is not eligible for upgrading to Windows 7. [Correction: Apparently, you can upgrade but a clean install is required.] However, it is something newer and with more safety features than XP and probably will serve the needs of many home users quite adequately.
The next post gives some more information on shopping for a laptop.
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