Acer, EMachines Show Bargain Notebooks

A pair of new low-cost notebooks released Monday blend wireless Internet technology with multimedia features as eMachines and Acer America look to the student market for sales.

Acer's TravelMate 290 comes with Intel's Centrino package of the Pentium M processor, an Intel chipset, and an 802.11b wireless chip. The eMachines M5310 uses a mobile processor from Advanced Micro Devices and an 802.11g chip from Broadcom.

The 802.11g standard allows the notebook to receive data wirelessly several times faster than the 802.11b standard, but is still compatible with more widely used 802.11b networking products.

Students looking to save a little more money will only need to spend $999 on the TravelMate 290. It comes with a 1.3-GHz Pentium M processor, 128MB of PC2100 (266-MHz) double data rate synchronous dynamic RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a 14.1-inch TFT display.

Price Points

Acer's price is very competitive against Centrino notebooks from market leaders Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Dell's Inspiron 600M notebooks start at $1,299, the same price as HP's Compaq X1000 notebooks, according to company Web sites. Both prices reflect mail-in rebate offers.

The eMachines M5310 is a little more expensive, at $1,199, but comes with a 15.4-inch widescreen display, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and a Radeon graphics card from ATI Technologies in addition to the AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ processor, a 40GB hard drive, and 512MB of DDR memory.

The M5310 uses a mainstream Athlon XP-M processor. AMD manufactures the Athlon XP-M with three different voltage ratings for different size notebooks, with desktop replacement, mainstream, and low-voltage versions.

Just about every notebook vendor, including HP, Dell, and Toshiba, has released a widescreen notebook this year. The larger display is more conducive to watching movies or television on the notebook, a prime selling point for many consumers as the important back-to-school selling season gets started over the next few weeks.