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Cheap PCs: The Real Deals

Yes, you can pay a little and get a lot: We test 8 bargain-priced PCs to find the best of the bunch.

Sean Captain

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Cheap Notebooks: What You Get and What You Don't

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Photograph: Kevin Candland
Though the price is right on the $899 Dell Inspiron 1150 and the $849 HP Pavilion Ze2000, you won't get the speed and handy extras--such as media card readers and Bluetooth--of higher-priced ($1500 and up) portables. The question is whether you'll be happy with what you're getting and comfortable with what you're not.

You can expect the basics. Both laptops provide ports for USB 2.0, ethernet, headphones, a microphone, and a modem, as well as a PC Card slot. The Pavilion Ze2000 has a FireWire port; the Inspiron 1150 omits that, but it does have 802.11g wireless. The optical drives are fixed rather than removable, so the notebooks are heavy. The 1150 has a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive; the Ze2000, a solo DVD-ROM drive. You get a few good software packages, too: The Ze2000 has Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Works, and Sonic RecordNow. The 1150 has WordPerfect Productivity Pack.

Expect decent but not great battery life. The Inspiron lasted a respectable 3 hours, 41 minutes in our tests, while the Pavilion managed an underwhelming 2 hours, 12 minutes.

The fairly predictable bad news: Both laptops take a hit in performance, offering Celeron processors rather than the more powerful Pentium M. The HP, with a 1.4-GHz Celeron M 360 CPU, earned a WorldBench 5 score of 62. The Dell, with a 2.6-GHz Celeron chip, was slower, garnering a WorldBench 5 score of 54. In comparison, notebooks with a 2-GHz Pentium M 755 have earned WorldBench 5 scores of 83 to 97--but they cost $2000 and up.

Both notebooks come with limited storage capacity, offering 40GB hard drives. The units also lack ATI Mobility Radeon or NVidia GeForce Go graphics chips, providing instead Intel graphics using main memory. The absence of dedicated graphics memory doesn't adversely affect basic office apps, but the integrated graphics are insufficient for serious video editing and gaming.

Narasu Rebbapragada

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