The Asus 1000HE would probably be pretty good. Under $400 too.

~B~

 

Looks good, think I could add another gig of memory to that?

 

This is what I recommended to my fathers friend. It came out to under $500 even with CA tax.

 

In that price point I would look at components more than brand. Nothing in that price range will have superior build quality. BB has some at that price. I would recommend them to start as you could handle it in store and decide if build felt good to you. I think Acer and HP or Toshiba likely to be your choices. I would recommend Intel over AMD. Not as much for Intel's clock for clock advantage but lower heat. AMD's run much hotter.

$500 should get you a Pentium Dual Core, 120GB to 160G HDD but have seen a 320GB once, and also 3GB to 4GB RAM. !5.4 WXGA. GMA4500 IGP. It should be good for all basic tasks and very little gaming.

Is a Netbook an option?

This is the best I see at BB today. It is a DeLL Inspiron so I would say while just average consumer build quality i is mainstream and build should be acceptable. It has Intel Pentium Dual Core. PDC are Core 2 Duo's with less L2. It has 160GB HDD and 3GB RAM. It comes with Vista Home Premium which is the best you can hope for in budget systems. So good not single core Celeron and Vista Basic. It has a GMA4500mHD most others don't at this price. This means it can process HD with the IGP. Cost, $480, link.

Good luck. That is my finding in budget. See what others find.

Edit: Toshiba above has larger HDD, less RAM, IGP is not the HD version. Handle both if Toshiba feels much better consider if not and DeLL price OK consider it.

 

I second the 1000HE if they don't mind a netbook. I'm actually using a 1000HE to type this. Yes you can add extra memory but you have to replace the 1GB stick since there is only one RAM slot. It can take up to 2GB. Something like this should do the trick: link.

 

I've heard it's extremely easy to change the RAM dimm on the 1000HE.

±B±

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlankThis I've heard it's extremely easy to change the RAM dimm on the 1000HE. ±B±

It's basically the same on any laptop or netbook that has a user-accessible RAM slot. They're all more-or-less easy.

The only problem I've found on the HE was you need to use a precision slotted screwdriver to gently pry the cover off after you've slid it "down".

 

Acer and Gateway both have good prices on budget laptops.