Budget ultraportable laptops

13.08.2010
Laptops are getting faster, more portable and cheaper as the back-to-school season rolls in. A new range of lightweight laptops from PC makers priced between US$400 to $600 are as portable as netbooks but offer much better performance.

These laptops come with screen sizes ranging from 11.6 inches to 13.3 inches and can offer long battery life, sometimes in excess of six hours. Performance-wise, these laptops are not slouches -- they can play back high-definition videos and are capable of handling casual gaming.

However, these laptops are not capable of handling intense gaming or demanding applications, given the limited processing power and graphics capabilities. These laptops also don't come with optical drives, so there could be an additional cost involved in buying a DVD or Blu-ray drive.

Dell Inspiron M101z

Dell recently introduced the , which the company claims offers "long battery life."

The laptop weighs about 3.44 pounds (1.56 kilograms), and Dell tests indicate the battery life to be about six hours and 30 minutes with a six-cell battery. The laptop is priced from US$449. It runs on power-efficient Athlon II Neo single- and dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices. It will decode and play back HD video with the help of AMD's ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics. The system supports up to 8GB of memory and 320GB of hard-drive storage. It also has a 1.3-megapixel webcam and an HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port to display HD video on external devices. Wireless connectivity options for the laptop include Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi.