Lab

£300 laptops

Once upon a time, trying to buy a laptop with £300 in your pocket wouldn't have left you many options. If you didn't want to buy second-hand, this tight a budget would have forced you to consider a cheap desktop PC instead. We're not talking years ago, either. Refer to December's £499 Notebooks Labs and you'll see that, while they all boasted dual-core processors, more than half of those laptops offered just 1GB of memory and 120GB hard drives -and all had integrated graphics. Factor in the VAT and delivery, and even the very cheapest laptop in that test came in at £552, with the most expensive models stretching right up to £600.

Fast forward just a few months and the winner of this month's Labs offers a dual-core processor, 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. When you consider that you're getting all that for just £400 including VAT, budget laptops have simply never offered so much for the money.

Specifications can be a good guide, but they never tell the whole story. When it comes to finding the right laptop for you, nothing beats actually going into a shop and trying a selection of laptops. Some people love glossy screens, for example, but they're enough to propel other PC users into a frothing rage. With some manufacturers allowing you to choose between them, often at no extra cost, it pays to know what you want.

It's a similar story when it comes to ergonomics. There's only one way to find out if a laptop has a good keyboard or a quality display, and that's to use it. That's why we've tested every aspect of our nine budget laptops to near-destruction, to find the best you can buy for less than £400, even including VAT, or less. All of the nine on test have 15.4in screens, but with prices from just £255 there's something for every budget.