Are sub-$200 laptops too basic to be useful? - khangwartan

Some laptops touted in Pitch-black Friday and other vacation sales are priced at to a lesser degree $200 from U.S. retailers the likes of Best Steal and Wal-Mart. But what do you get in such inexpensive machines?

For cardinal, you can't play the latest games or extend to intense applications with these lightly configured laptops, and the machines are not the easiest to carry around. The laptops are adequate for basic Web surfing, word processing, or free-and-easy gambling; and one could replace an aging screen background or laptop at home.

Only these laptops are not for everyone. It may beryllium worth considering a higher-priced laptop with Intel's Essence operating room Advanced Micro Devices' A-serial publication processors for resource-heavy applications or multimedia system. Lightweight ultrabooks or contact laptops will also be priced higher, maybe more than $500.

One such inexpensive laptop is Lenovo's G585, which which Best Buy out advertised for $187.99 protrusive on Black Friday (and whatever deals continue through its Cyber Sale). Interchangeable configurations are available, too priced less than $200, at other stores. Wal-Marketplace began selling the Compaq Presario CQ58 for $179 in approximately stores on Black Friday; markedowns continue in its Cyber Week specials.

The sub-$200 laptops will have Windows 8 and run on basic processors. The laptops leave not have touchscreens, which is one of the major features supported by Windows 8, which started shipping with PCs and tablets in tardily October. Touchscreens are considered a premium feature, and users will likely pay to a greater extent for laptops that offer them.

The Lenovo G585 has hardware that English hawthorn be found in many of the torpedo-$200 laptops that will be available over the orgasm weeks of the vacation shopping flavour. Best Buy is pitching the G585 for daily activities like Web browsing, checking e-mail, operating theater basic video and audio. The laptop weighs 5 lbs., 11 oz.; has a 15.6-inch screen; and runs connected an Advanced Micro Devices dual-sum E300 chip.

The E-300 processor was released more than than a class ago and sits on the bottom rundle of chips offered by AMD, and is adequate for the OS and alkaline productivity applications. Expect some sub-$200 laptops to ejaculate with Celeron processors, which are among the cheapest PC chips offered away Intel. Neither E-300 or Celeron will deliver the blazing speeds of the modish Intel Kernel or AMD A-series processors, which appear in more expensive laptops.

Trade-offs for price

The G585 offers "about the speed of a mainstream notebook computer from five years ago, only at lour power expenditure and with all of the other modern conveniences of existence built on a newer platform," same Anand Shimpi, who runs Anandtech, a technology news show and benchmarking site. The CPU should be a bit better than the current crop of smartphone and tablet CPUs, but it may not match high with the latest ARM Cortex-A15 CPU in Google's Nexus 10 tablet, Shimpi said.

Users should be able to play light games at double-bass-quality settings with "OK frame rates" on the G585, Shimpi said.

The laptop computer has a 320GB hard push, which is also the capacity offered on Walmart's Compaq Presario CQ58 laptop . If documents and high-definition movies start piling up, the capacity will not equal enough. Laptop hard drives potty be upgraded, but storage will need to be purchased separately.

"Ultimately, my bigger concerns wouldn't be about compute but the computer memory subsystem. Mechanical drives can make these systems feel very slow, an upgrade to even a $100 solid drive would do wonders for this simple machine," Shimpi said.

Other features along the Lenovo G585 laptop include a webcam and two USB 3.0 ports, which were not in about of the sub-$200 laptops in previous old age. The G585 has 2GB of Random access memory, which is expandable to 8GB.

Other laptops such as Acer's Chromebook C7 lightweight laptop are already free for $199. The Acer Chromebook comes with Google's Chromium-plate OS.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Chitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com