| Introduction |
| Acer Travelmate 223X |
| Apple iBook |
| Dell Inspiron 2650 |
| IBM ThinkPad R31 26562MM |
| Sony Vaio PCG-FX950 |
| Toshiba Satellite 1400 |
| How we tested |
| Benchmarks |
| Specifications |
| Editor's Choice |
Notebooks have long been the province of executives on healthy salaries -- who could afford them -- and travelling salespeople who had a genuine need of them. Small users, and especially those on a budget, could ill afford these pint sized computers.
Notebook manufacturers have realised that there's a large market out there for portable PCs -- sales are booming while desktop profit margins are whittled down to even more cutthroat levels.
The practical upshot of this is that it's easier than ever to buy a notebook bristling with pure computing power. The problem for most people is that it's still quite expensive. The good news is that a budget notebook doesn't necessarily mean a poor quality one.
We've examined six different notebook options with one thing in common; they all cost less than AU$3,000. This puts them in a particularly sweet spot for an awful lot of technology purchasers. On the corporate side, why spend AU$6,000 on a top of the range model if budget kit suits your needs? On the home side, AU$3,000 may be all you have to spend. Just because your budget is limited, doesn't mean that you have to limit your choices, or even the technologies you end up implementing.
