Laptops at netbook prices [List]

There will always be a market for designer tech, but not everyone has a trust fund to go buy a Mac Mini or a super-phone in India. How you budget out your hard-earned/trust fund money is entirely your business, but for less than Rs 60,000 - the price of a Macbook or an Alienware M11x, your computing equation looks roughly like this:

a) AMD/Intel quad core desktop PC + netbook
b) Desktop replacement laptop + Nettop/SFF PC
c) Alternatively, you could put all your money on a laptop, and connect it to to a basic LCD monitor at home. If your graphics card supports it, you can run a dual-display configuration on your desk, this will ensure a clean and open workspace that only takes the space of a monitor.
d) The fourth alternative, which is the surprising find here, is that you could have a rigged up quad core PC and a dual core laptop for around the price of a Macbook.

Professional laptops at the price of a Netbook The last thing you want is a laptop that lags incessantly when working. The netbook form factor has its attractions, but most of them run on single core atom processors, and are not really recommended for development or professional work, unless involves writing, excel and basic email. We wouldn’t recommend CULV’s either, they tend to be a bit more expensive and give you lower multitasking and multitabbing potential. We sent a mail out to Asus wondering what laptops are available at the price of a high end smartphone or a netbook. Asus shot back with an juicy excel sheet full of model numbers, prices, configuration details, we’ve spent a bit of time trimming out the faff, here’s a spec table of Asus laptops priced between 25,000 to 30,000.

K40AF-VX012D: AMD M320-2.1G, 2 GB DDR II(2GB), 320 GB SATA(5400rpm), ATI 4570 512MB, 8xSuper Multi-Dual, 1.3 M, NA, 802.11 b/g/n, 6 Cell x 1, Carry bag, Mouse, Color:Black, 14.0" HD(LED backlight) Color-Shine , external BT, Dos, 2.4 Kg with 6 Cell , 2 Years Global / 1 Year Battery.

At an MRP of Rs 26,000, this is one of the cheapest dual-core laptops you can find - it’s powered by the AMD M320, this Athlon II mobile processor has 64 Bit and hardware Virtualization support. As for graphics, it has the DX 10.1 compliant ATI 4570, decent enough for casual games, but lacks HDMI support.

A52F-SX087D : Intel i3-350-2.26G, 2 GB DDR III, 320 GB SATA5400rpm), Intel share share, 8xSuper Multi-Dual, 0.3 M, HDMI, 802.11 b/g/n, 6 Cell x 1, Carry bag, Mouse, external BT , Color:Titanium Grey, 15.6" HD(LED backlight) 16:9 Golden Ratio, Free Dos, 2.5 Kg with 6 Cell , 1 Years Global / 1 Year Battery.

This Core i3 laptop ships with DOS - you could run Ubuntu on it, or buy a Windows license separately. It runs on Intel graphics so the battery life should be decent, and it also has an HDMI port. It has a 15.6-inch screen, 2 GB of DDR 3 memory, and a 6 cell battery. Yours for approximately 29,000. We’ll try and update this table with dual-core laptop configurations, we did an article in March looking at laptops below 25,000, Acer, HP, Dell, Toshiba, all probably have some end-of-life stocks at the 30,000 rupee range .. If you know of any value for money options, feel free to share it on the comments below: