If all you’re interested in is where to purchase a cheap laptop you need look no further than your local Wal-Mart or BestBuy. But I think what most people don’t realize is just how limited their selection will be and how under powered some of those units are.
I think a better option is Amazon. They have hundereds of laptops and netbooks at great prices all in one place. You can also read customer reviews and get the opinions of others who have already bought and used the notebook you are intersted in.
Also you should consider that if you just go out and get the lowest price that you can find you may get that laptop computer home and find out that it dosen’t have enough memory or processer power to do the job that you want it to do.
Some times cheap is just that. You need to be sure that the computer you get has enough memory and that the CPU is up to the job you intend to use it for. If you end up having to ad more memory later that cheap laptop is going to start getting pretty expensive.
A friend of mine bought a notebook and soon found out that it was way to slow and ended up having to spend over $120 to get the memory he needed. Usually it would not have been that much but the manufacturer had used 2 500 MB chips instead of 1 1 GB chip so he had to replace both to upgrade.
When buying a laptop maybe you should think more in terms of value than cheap. You can get that plus a lot more at Amazon.
It seems that these days the distinction between laptop and netbook no longer exists. If you don’t know the difference is basically that a laptop or notebook has a CD or DVD drive and a netbook dose not. Today though everything is being called a laptop.
Having said that the smallest laptop is made by UMID and is called the mbook. It has a 4.8 inch touchscreen with 1024 x 600 resolution, 1.1GHz or 1.3GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of memory, but the Flash-based storage provided ranges between 8GB and 32GB.
It also has Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, 3G and Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity. With a Mini-USB 2.0, Micro SD slot and Mobile sim-card slot it’s versatile as well. The battery life is an impressive 6 hours.
Here’s a video from Youtube on the UMID mbook:
There are other laptop/netbooks out there that are a little larger but still small enough to be ultra portable and easier to use and view. Asus makes several with 7″ screens, the Sony VAIO Lifestyle series has an 8″ screen and Acer, HP and ASUS all have several models with 8.9″ screens.
There you have it the UMID mbook is the smallest laptop made today although it probably is not the best if you are looking for an ultra small laptop.
