AnandTech: $600 Notebook Roundup - Crowning the Affordability King

AnandTech: $600 Notebook Roundup - Crowning the Affordability King:

The first and most important point we want you to take away from this roundup is that for $600, you can actually get a pretty decent notebook. The build quality of all of the notebooks here was far from poor, and any of these notebooks have the performance and battery life to work just fine as entry level machines.

The next thing to keep in mind is that it is very easy to have a $600 notebook turn into a $1000 notebook with options and upgrades that manufacturers will push on you before you check out. If we could have anything on these notebooks it’d be: more memory and wireless support. Not a single notebook in this roundup offered us more than 256MB of RAM, and for Windows XP these days, you need 512MB to keep from swapping to that slow 2.5” hard drive. The Compaq offerings all gave us built in wireless, but generally for less than $50 you can add wireless support to both the Gateway and Dell solutions - and for a notebook, it’s definitely worth it.