It is really astonishing to look at the progress Laptop have made in just a few years. Last quarter, laptop sales

overtook desktop sales for the first time in history. These days the pricing of low end PCs, both laptop & desktops are similar & so it has become worth wondering whether to buy a desktop at all. In a few months I will purchase my first notebook Laptop & being fifteen, I am not able to buy a 17 inch widescreen Dell XPS or the Savrow line of Laptop. Instead I look through the budget, the low price, & the beginner Laptop for one that will catch my eye.

These days the features & specifications of cheap Laptop surprise me several Laptop around the £500 mark include DVD burners and integrated WiFi receivers, which at the beginning of the year were only in the £1200+ Laptop that would not be within the reach of the first time buyer. Of course there are some such as the Lenovo IBM ThinkPad R50e which does retail for £505 and only have 256MB of RAM & no DVD burner & no integrated WiFi. I should not be disappointed. One year ago, those would be acceptable specifications for a mid range laptop & today they are unacceptable for a bargain Laptop such as the Dell Inspiron 2200. How things have changed.

Recently Apple upgraded their iBook range, which starts at £700, and the Laptop now include Bluetooth and WiFi as well as 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive. The 12inch iBook is pricey, at £200 more than two of its Win competitors, the Acer 3502WLMi and the Dell Inspiron 2200. Both the Acer & the Dell have slightly faster processors, DVD burners (which Apple calls the SuperDrive) & the world’s favourite operating system. I love Apple computers, but I cannot buy an iBook & feel that I have made the best decision. Even the expensive PowerBook lines are bad value when compared with the Sony Vaios, IBM ThinkPads & Dell Precision lines.

The reason that the Win Laptop are better is the processor, the number of features and the fact that Apple’s care and attention to detail is not worth £200 to a person like me. I appreciate their efforts but when they lose out on the first time buyers, they may set a trend. The buyer brings home their brand new Win laptop & all the feelings of euphoria are now attached to a Win laptop, & not the iBook. Apple cannot afford to continue doing this & hopefully the Intel switch will bring down prices or save money, letting them add features such as the SuperDrive.

Dell makes Laptop in every segment of the market. Their high end Laptop are well made & have some quirky touches like the lights on the XPS. Of course when a company sets out to make budget Laptop, cost cutting is an integral part of the mix. Dell immediately threw out build quality & attention to detail. They added the DVD burner & the WiFi which I appreciate but if my laptop creaks as I open it, as a year-old Inspiron 1000 does, I will feel quite disappointed. The Dell does only have a 40GB hard drive which is adequate for now but 60 or 80GB is better.

IBM does put the effort in to make quality Laptop. This means their ThinkPad R50e does not have the same features, no DVD burner and no WiFi but the excellent keyboard & the pointing device, are better than Dell’s cut-price keyboard & the slippery trackpad. I am a person who values the extra features, the DVD burner is very important & Acer’s Aspire 3502WLMi has a dual-layer burner which means almost 10GB of data on one disk. Since I don’t want to skimp on the quality so I cannot see myself buying the poorly made but inexpensive Dell Inspiron 2200.

Asus is a relatively unknown Laptop company who, like IBM , value quality but unlike IBM don’t price it highly. Their Laptop are made out of metal & have a small form factor while maintaining a long list of features. However, they only have 256MB RAM in the A3L-5001H which is a beautiful machine, more attractive than any other Win laptop in this price range. It has Win XP Pro which is far superior to Win XP Home Edition, a comparison on Microsoft’s website shows how significant the gap is between the two versions. However, there is no DVD burner. WiFi is included. The best thing is that Asus offers 1GB of RAM for only £90. This upgrade usually costs around £250-£400 in majority Laptop. A Celeron M 370 & a 60GB hard drive are just icing on the cake.

The lack of a DVD burner is offset by Win XP Pro and the fantastic amount of RAM does mean the price is higher than I would normally pay. £640 is tantalisingly close to an iBook, but the iBook has 20GB less space & 512MB less RAM. RAM is so important that spending a little more on it is worth every penny. So all the big names are beaten by an unknown manufacturer. Seems like a bad decision but knowing that my machine looks & feels expensive while having 1GB of RAM & Win XP Pro are more than enough to make up for it.

The other option is Acer’s Aspire 3002LMi, with 512MB RAM, 60GB, Win XP Home Edition and a dual layer DVD burner, WiFi but an AMD processor. Acer’s Aspire 3502WLMi has 20GB less, an Intel Celeron M 360 & costs the same. The Aspire 3002LMi can be bought for £501 which is unbelievably cheap. When compared with the Asus, the upsides are £210, a DVD burner & a widescreen display. The downsides are Win XP Home Edition, half the RAM & the aforementioned build quality.

Of course if you are in the market to buy a new laptop and need one now, then consider these options. Otherwise, wait for Win Vista (or Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) in 2006 & Laptop with more RAM, larger hard drives, bigger screens & DVD burners & WiFi as standard.