A survey of sub-$500 laptops in the Sunday paper

Once upon a time there were long lines outside stores if they had laptops under $500. Today, it is rather uncommon if none of the weekly circular ads feature at least one sub-$500 laptop. It's certainly a buyer's market, especially if you are interested in function over specs and style.

And even though netbooks cost less, the sub-$500 laptops are where you get the best bang for the buck in terms of computing. You can't compare a dual-core 15.4" laptop versus a 9" Atom for general-purpose usage!

So let's take this week for example. Digging inside the Sunday paper, we grab the overstuffed Best Buy circular, and voila on page #30, we find not a $500, but a $400 laptop! No rebates mind you! This is no Celeron mind you, it has a dual-core Pentium. It's an Acer exclusive model, the AS5735-4774, an Aspire that ...inspires bargain hunters :-) It has a respectable 2 gigs of memory and 160gb of disk, and get this, it has a newer 15.6" widescreen instead of the most common 15.4".

Then we head over to their bitter rival, the struggling Circuit City, where they list the Compaq CQ50103us for $480 after a $30 mail-in rebate. This has a dual core T3200, with 2gb memory, 160gb disk, the typical 15.4" wide display, and the usual fare you would expect from a "modern era" model.

$400 is the new $500?
And we are not done yet, next we pull out the Staples circular, where the "That Was Easy" people are handily beating Circuit on price, as they offer the Presario GQ50-130us for just $400 after a $30 EasyRebate. Not a typo, four hundred dollars! The specs are the same as above of course, where we forgot to mention, they include a dvd burner, wireless and everyone's favorite punching bag, Vista Premium. So perhaps we need to change the title of this from sub-$500 to sub-$400 :)

Still at Staples, yes, another one, but after a $50 Easy-Rebate. This time it is the HP G60-120us for $500 after the aforementioned rebate. This has the newer 15.6" display, so you know it is not an ancient laptop they unearthed for this special ;-) A very usable 3gb memory, 250gb disk, Athlon RM-70, and that's not all. A numeric keypad (oh what a luxury?), dvd burner, webcam, wireless (including N), and things like that.