Last year I mentioned the Asus EeePC Notebook in “A Second Laptop“. The EeePC is surprisingly capable for such a small notebook. I know this from first hand experience, as I have written and posted blog entries with the Asus. It is aimed at people who already have a desktop or notebook computer though. In fact it ships with a recovery DVD but does not have an optical drive, so you need another PC or an external USB DVD drive.

The reason I’m stressing this point is that some technology writers seem to have missed the point and written than for just a few hundred dollars more you can buy a notebook that is more capable for everyday computing needs. However, then you are looking at a notebook in the budget notebook class which will weigh considerably more. Out of interest I looked around for a budget notebook for less than $600 (since the Asus Eee PC 4G Notebook costs about $399).

There was not much choice in this price range for a new notebook with semi-decent specs. What I found was two notebooks: the Dell Vostro 100 and the Acer Aspire 5520. Obviously other notebooks with better specs may be available on special. Both notebooks have AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processors, with the Dell Vostro having 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately it only has Windows Vista Home Basic which is the most “basic” Windows Vista edition. The Acer has Windows Vista Home Premium, but is hobbled with only 1GB RAM. Both notebooks weigh three times as much as the Asus EeePC at over 6 pounds, so are not as portable. They do run Windows though, and have built-in DVD writers as well as 120GB hard drives, and are relatively suitable for everyday computing needs.

Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by mervyn