Lab

£500 laptops

Everyone loves a bargain, but shopping online for the best specs at the lowest prices could lead you to a laptop-shaped disaster. A poor screen or keyboard can ruin an otherwise excellent laptop, but these are qualities you can't judge by reading specs and looking at pictures. Even going to your local retailer and trying out a range of laptops for yourself won't help you get a measure of their battery life or whether the core components are well balanced.

As you're reading this magazine, you don't need to be told that the most reliable way to find the best-value products is to trust our expert reviews, based on extensive hands-on comparative testing. Great laptops for £500 are alive and well, and over the next six pages we'll tell you which ones they are.

Entry-level laptops can be littered with compromises, but £500 no longer represents the absolute bargain basement. Modern processor speeds are such that any of the laptops in this month's Labs will comfortably run any mainstream Windows software, their hard disks are big enough for tens of thousands of MP3 tracks and digital photos, and their screens will make DVDs look fantastic. They all look smart and have widescreen displays with native resolutions of 1,280x800 pixels. They all include an eight-speed DVD writer that supports all types of writable DVD, plenty of USB2 ports and an ExpressCard/54 expansion slot.

However, they can't provide many of the luxuries we found in our Labs test of £700 laptops last month. None has HDMI or DVI outputs for connecting digitally to external displays, although analogue VGA outputs are standard across the board and a couple also include an S-video out for connecting to a TV. None supports the latest Draft-N wireless networking standard, but they all support 802.11b and g.

Same difference

Despite their similarities, these laptops are all quite different from one another in various ways. Portability is a key feature for a laptop PC. Five of the six models are similar in this respect, weighing around 2.7kg and measuring around 360mm along their longest edges. However, PC Nextday provided an ultra-portable model, which weighs just 2kg and measures 299mm. Most laptops rarely leave their owners' houses, but if you plan to do a lot of travelling with yours, this compact design would be a real benefit if it weren't for its poor battery life. One hour and 23 minutes in our light use test is less than half that of many of the other laptops here, and means that the PC Nextday laptop isn't really suited to an outward-bound life at all.

The quality of keyboards and mice is often a weak point in budget laptops, but we're delighted to see that the standard in this group is extremely high. However, some models still fare better than others. The biggest variation was in the keyboard quality, and this is an area in which the smaller system builders sadly failed to compete with the established big brands. The Eclipse laptop's keyboard feels squishy, while the PC Nextday's keyboard layout is cramped and caused us to make lots of mistakes while typing. Both models also generated more fan noise than the others, and the PC Nextday laptop got a little hot. On the upside, their screens competed well with the big brands' displays, and the PC Nextday's screen showed smooth greyscales. Touch pad quality is important, too. The touch pads on the Eclipse and PC Nextday laptops are easy to use, but you should consider budgeting for a USB mouse if you want to use the Toshiba laptop for any length of time. Speaker quality varied widely. The Toshiba and Acer laptops sounded reasonable and the PC Nextday and Samsung models were awful, but even the best speakers are far from high-fidelity. If you want to listen to music from your laptop, you'll need to plug in external speakers or headphones.

Performance anxiety

There are two ways to think about performance in a budget laptop. One is that none of these models is particularly fast, and that a 26 per cent increase in power (the difference between the slowest and fastest in our Windows benchmarks) won't make much difference when you're typing a letter or browsing the web. If you plan to use your laptop only for this kind of task, we would largely go along with this school of thought, although a faster model might cope better with future developments in web design or updates to Windows Vista. On the other hand, if you want to edit photos or video or produce music, all of these laptops make it possible but the faster ones will handle these tasks more quickly.

Getting the balance of core components is important, too. HP includes only 1GB of RAM, but this leaves enough cash in the budget for a Core 2 Duo T7250 processor, which is a fast chip by any standards. Others have paired a slower processor with 2GB of RAM, which makes more sense if you'll be running multiple applications that aren't particularly demanding. However, if you want the best of both worlds but can't quite afford it, choosing 1GB of RAM and a faster processor is preferable, as it's relatively easy to insert another RAM module later.

Hard disk capacity doesn't directly affect performance, but for creative and multimedia tasks, bigger is most definitely better, especially as you can't add a second internal disk, and attaching an external one will make a laptop less portable.

Games performance is almost an irrelevant consideration on low-cost laptops such as these. Even the fastest 3D performer, Eclipse's Zeus i525n84, doesn't have enough graphics processing power to handle the latest 3D games properly, even though it can technically run them. The only reason to consider Eclipse's laptop is if you have a few old games that you'd like to continue playing, perhaps in multiplayer mode networked to your desktop PC.