Best Laptop For The Money

Since there are so many different models of notebooks on the market, it can be quite a difficult task to choose the best one. There isn’t a specific laptop good for anyone, because each category of people has its own needs and there is a certain laptop good for them. For example the best laptop for a business man won’t be the best one for a college student, or for a gamer and so on. And that’s why you will first need to think of the main activities that you will be doing at the laptop, and according to them you will need to decide on what laptop to buy.




In case money are a problem for you, today we’ll give you to options for buying a cheap laptop. We’ll compare 2 different models from 2 different producers, and we’ll see which is the best laptop for the money. And since there are many models on the market today with a price of 499 dollars, we’ll take this price for our comparison. And we’ll compare a laptop made by HP with one made by Toshiba.

So let’s discuss first about the HP model, and we’ll choose the HP – Laptop with Intel ® Pentium ® Processor – Black, Model: G 60-635 DX | SKU: 9700696. As you can notice from its name, this one features a Intel Pentium Processor, that has an 800 Mhz fronstide bus, 1 MB L2 cache and 2.1 Ghz processor speed…so it is not such a bad one after all. Its RAM memory has 3 GB of DDR 2 DIMM memory, that can be expanded to 4 GB. The oprical drive is a really good one, and it is a Multiformat DVD ± RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support. So this means that you can have up to 8.5 of data on a single DVD. The display screen is a 15.6 inch High Definition widescreen display that has a resolution of 1366 x 768 and which will offer quite good colors and images. The hard drive offers 320 GB of disc space at 5400 rpm. The graphics engine is a basic Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500 M, and this laptop also features a HDMI port for connecting it to a High Definition TV. Besides all of these it also has a built in webcam with microphone and a 5 in 1 digital media reader. And of course it has wireless and Ethernet connectivity for easy access to the internet, it is Energy Star Qualified and comes with an installed version of the Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64 bit.

So these were the details on the HP model, now let’s see what the Toshiba model has to offer. We’ll take them in the exact same order, and compare them. From this company we’ll choose the Toshiba – Satellite Laptop with Intel ® Pentium ® Processor – Graphite, Model: L 505-ES 5018 | SKU: 9705221. The processor of this laptop is also an Intel Pentium with an 800 MHz frontside bus, 1 MB L 2 cache and 2.2 GHz processor speed. So it is almost exactly the same as the one from the HP laptop, with just 0.1 extra Ghz, so we can’t consider this a big advantage. But we can combine this small advantage with another one – the fact that the Toshiba laptop has 3 GB of DDR 3 memory (and not DDR 2 like on the HP) which can be expanded to 8 GB (and not 4 GB). So with these 2 small advantages we can say that now the Toshiba model takes the lead with 1-0. The optical drive is also the same (Multiformat DVD ± RW/CD-RW drive) and the display screen also has 15.6 inch and a diagonal of 1366 x 768.

The hard drive and the optical drive are also exactly the same on both models (a 320 GB hard drive and a Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500 M). This model also has a built in webcam and microphone, a 5 in 1 media card reader both wireless and Ethernet connectivity for easy access to the internet. And it is also Energy Star Qualified and comes with an installed Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64 bit. But the resemblances end here, because the Toshiba model has a weaker battery life (2 hours and 55 minutes compared to 3 hours and 45 minutes for the HP model). So now we can say that the score is 1-1. And the final score will be 2-2, and this is because the Toshiba laptop is lighter and thinner (weighs 6 lbs and has 1.6 inch thin, compared to the HP that weighs 6.6 and has 1.7 inch thin)…but the HP model has 3 USB ports compared to just 2 for the Toshiba. So we can consider a perfect equality between these 2 models, and finally it is up to you to decide whether you prefer a model with a slightly better processor and RAM memory, but with less USB ports and with a smaller life of the battery, or you prefer one that has more USB ports, and a longer battery life, but which is just a little heavier and thicker.

But after all they are both really good laptops, from good producers, that offer quite nice features for just 499 dollars.