Best Laptops for Less Than $1000: Can They Get the Job Done?

Great Choices for Less Than a Grand

We review hundreds of laptops in the course of a year, and some excellent options in the less-than-$1000 range have come our way recently. Here are three of our favorites.

HP Pavilion dv6500t

• PCW Rating: 86 Very Good
• Rank: #2 on PC World's Top 10 All-Purpose Laptops chart (September 2007)
• Recent low price online: $699
• What you get for the money: The Pavilion dv6500t is a gorgeous laptop with a stylish, high-gloss case and backlit media controls. The machine is well equipped with draft-n Wi-Fi (along with 802.11a/b/g), HDMI output for connecting to a TV, three USB ports, a seven-in-one shared card slot, fantastic stereo speakers, a 15.4-inch glossy wide screen, and a 640-by-480-resolution Webcam.

Our review unit earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 75, only 10 percent slower than the fastest laptops we've tested. In our test the dv6500t went for nearly 4 hours on a battery charge, too. You can configure the laptop with a hard drive of up to 250GB (a $150 increase from the standard 80GB drive).

• See the full test and specs report.

Drawbacks: The dv6500t weighs 6.2 pounds. Serious gamers will need to upgrade from the basic Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 chip to the optional 128MB nVidia GeForce Go 8400M GS graphics chip (an extra $79).

As with many other HP consumer laptops, the dv6500t's glossy screen reflects overhead lights, which can be distracting unless you tilt the screen just so.

Lenovo ThinkPad R61

• PCW Rating: 83 Very Good
• Rank: #4 on PC World's Top 10 All-Purpose Laptops chart (September 2007)
• Recent low price online: $1135

What you get for the money: Some R61 configurations cost as low as $670 but are bare-bones. Recently, however, an R61e with 2GB of memory, Windows Vista Home Premium, and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU could be configured for $989.

The ThinkPad R61 has plenty of cool features, including the ThinkLight, an LED that illuminates the keyboard so you can type comfortably in low lighting. ThinkPad keyboards are among the best, and the R61's keyboard is no exception.

The laptop's modular bay lets you hot-swap devices such as a dual-layer DVD drive or an extra battery. The battery in our review unit lasted a healthy 3 hours, 19 minutes. And the 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7500-equipped R61 performed well in our speed tests, earning a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 80. The 14.1-inch-screen model weighs 5.8 pounds, a bit lighter than other laptops in this price range.

Worth noting: In a recent survey, Consumer Reports readers ranked Lenovo tech support as second only to Apple's. The survey also found Lenovo and Compaq laptops tied in needing the fewest repairs among eight leading laptop brands.

Drawbacks: Lenovo ThinkPads are designed more for business than pleasure, so shoppers seeking slick multimedia features should look elsewhere.

• See the full test and specs report.

Toshiba Satellite A215-S4757

• PCW Rating: 82 Very Good
• Rank: #5 on PC World's Top 10 All-Purpose Laptops chart (September 2007)
• Recent low price online: $770

What you get for the money: The Toshiba Satellite A215-S4757 comes with a DVD burner, a full range of ports (including FireWire), and both an ExpressCard slot and a three-in-one memory card slot. The keyboard layout is first-rate, and you get seven handy buttons for turning on the notebook, launching your chosen browser, and controlling CDs and DVDs.

Drawbacks: The A215-S4757 weighs 6.2 pounds. Performance is so-so, too. This laptop's overall WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 60 put it in a tie with the Asus A8JR-4P021C for the lowest rating among 13 recently tested laptops. And the battery lasted only 2.3 hours on one charge, about an hour less than the 3.2-hour average for this laptop class.

• See the full test and specs report.