What’s The Best And Cheapest Notebook Around?

Calling all college students and people who make less than six figures a year! You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get a great laptop!

Lately, there’s been a real push to make great laptops more accessible. On the extreme end, you see people creating basic, no frills units for astronomically low prices, and while this is great for some people, the specs on these machines aren’t very impressive. One laptop, whose maker proudly sells it as the Hundred Dollar Notebook (even though the market price is more like two hundred!) is fine for basic word processing, but does not have wireless internet, and runs on about five hundred megabytes of memory. So, yeah, whoop de doo! It’s only a hundred bucks and it doesn’t do anything!
Luckily, the fortunate side effect of this push has been that a lot of good laptops have actually had their prices dropped to the five hundred dollar range. One of the best of these would probably be the
Dell, in particular, has been trying their best to give users expensive quality laptops at a low quality price. Perhaps the crowning achievement in their bargain lineup would be the Dell Studio 15.
While most of Dell’s cheaper laptops are geared more towards simpler uses, the Studio 15 is created with the gamer and multimedia whiz in mind. Fresh out of the box, it can handle most games, it can do photoshop and basic video editing, and with a few small upgrades, it can be brought up very nearly to the level of, say, an Alienware rig.
The laptop starts around $650, though you might find it anywhere from $550 to $750, so be sure to shop around before forking any money over, because, realistically, you should add about one hundred dollars to whatever you wind up paying.
That one hundred bucks should more than cover all of your basic upgrades. It’s kind of designed as an all-around system for multimedia folk, it runs games, it does sound editing, it does video editing, and it does graphic arts. It does all of them well, and none of them excellently. With a few small upgrades, you can customize it to be very nearly perfect for whatever you have in mind, but out of the box, you might find it just a tad lacking.
Still, you wind up with a total cost of maybe less than seven hundred bucks, which is about half what you could expect to pay buying something that is top of the line fresh out of the box.