Best cheap laptops for £499 and under

Round-up by: Patrick Wignall

Last updated: 04 May 2007

Laptops are now so popular they outsell desktop PCs in Western Europe. It's not difficult to see why -- a few years ago, if you were looking for a new machine, you'd expect to spend well over a grand, but these days you can pick up a decent model for less than half that amount.

The good news is when you opt for a budget machine you won't necessarily be left with an Ugly Betty. As companies tend to build a single chassis and then stuff it full of different components to satisfy different price points, the low-end machines can look almost identical to the same company's mid-range offerings.

Of course, some compromises will have been made under the bonnet. As you would expect, budget machines tend to use the slower mobile chips such as the Celeron and Sempron. For £499 and under, you simply won't find a machine that's suitable for playing the latest games. Low-cost models generally use less powerful onboard graphics chips, such as Intel's Mobile 945GM Express or Nvida's GeForce Go 6100.

Nevertheless, even with these cheaper components, the laptops still have more than enough power to handle normal tasks such as emailing, Web surfing, photo editing and even a spot of video editing.

One thing we would pay attention to, though, is the amount of memory offered as standard. Often manufacturers will try to get away with the least amount of RAM possible, and typically on laptops running Vista this will be 512MB.

This isn't enough memory to comfortably run a few applications at the same time, so we'd strongly to advise you to upgrade to 1GB of RAM. For day-to-day tasks, having more memory available is more important than a faster processor, so we'd advise you to go for a memory upgrade if it's available.

Bearing all this in mind we've rounded up four of the best budget models available for under £500 to put them through their paces.