On the trail of the $400 laptop

CAN YOU GET a laptop for $400? This holiday season, you can find not one, but four (4) options here in the States.

If you were able to beat the holiday rush, Best Buy was offering a Compaq Presario C713NR at $399 (after “instant savings” applied) with a Dual Core T2310 processor, 1GB of RAM, a double-layer DVD-RW, 15.4-inch screen at 1280x800 resolution, 80GB SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g wireless, three USB 2.0 ports plus 10/100 Ethernet built in, a SD slot, weighing in at 6.4 pounds. The only drawbacks to this package were Windows Vista Home Basic and a stock Intel Graphics Media Accelerator x3100 sharing video memory. It also maxes out at 1GB of RAM and doesn’t have an ExpressCard or PC-Card slot, so you get what you get, and that’s it.

Over at Circuit City, once you subtract the $200 of (ugh!) mail-in rebates, the Toshiba Satellite A-135 is up for grabs. It has a Intel Celeron M running at 1.73GHz, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, four USB 2.0 ports, 802.11 b/g wireless and 10/100 Ethernet, 15.4-inch screen at 1280x800, and a DVD SuperMulti optical drive which lets you read and burn DVD-RAM disks so you can swap them with your Toshiba friends. Unlike the Compaq, you can expand the RAM to 2 GB and it also has a type II PC Card slot, plus a 5-1 media adapter, so you can read SD, XD, and both flavors of Sony’s Memory Stick. Still stuck with Windows Vista Home Basic, too.

If you have a choice between the two, it’s a tough one. The Compaq would have better CPU performance, the Toshiba has better expandability with RAM and the Type II PC Card slot. You may need the 2 GB of RAM for Windows Vista Home Basic and you should always have a slot in your laptop in my opinion.

Don’t like Windows Vista? You still have two (2) options available. If you want to be hip, you can buy an ASUS Eee PC running Linux. The 2GB flash version of the Eee in “Blush Pink” can be pre-ordered at J&R for $299; includes a 7-inch 800x480 display, 802.11 b/g WiFi, 10/100 Ethernet, an Intel Celeron “Mobile” CPU, 512MB RAM, an SD reader and three USB ports. A black version with a 4GB flash drive can be pre-ordered for $349. Both units weigh in at around two pounds and boot fast with the flash and Linux code load. Interesting, the 4GB Eee is listing as high as $420 through some outlets.

The dilemma between the Eee and the Windows Vista Basic offerings is that for an extra $50-100, you get a full-up Windows-compatible PC with a larger screen, a DVD-RW/DL drive and an 80GB hard drive. It’s not a tough jump for the extra hundred bucks.

Finally, if you want to join the Goody-Goody/Feel-Good cult, you can buy into the OLPC cult. For $399, you can get one OLPC sent to your house and the other one sent to “empower a child” in a developing country. Join Masi Oka, Tim Kring, and everyone else at xogiving.org/laptopgiving.org/laptop.org in the “limited time” offer extended to December 31 to get a hardened Linus laptop with a 1GB flash drive with 256MB of RAM on a 433MHz AMD Geode processor, plus 802.11b/g, weighing in at 3.2 pounds.

Of course, if you would prefer something a bit messier and non-sexy than laptops to the underpriv’d, you could suck it up and spend a couple of minutes on www.savethechildren.org. Does $200 there make more sense there than for a device that may benefit a single child? µ