Best Notebook with Price Under $800 and Processor Speed Atleast 2.0 GHz

The bottom line: If you're in the market for an affordable thin-and-light, the Asus UL30A-A1 provides great value and a solid Core 2 Duo CULV processor in an attractive package.

HP’s effort fell flat, simply offering the wrong mix of performance and battery life. *

Backlight brightness levels were very good, even at the 70% level we like to use for battery tests. *

The Bottom Line

Despite the glossiness, horizontal and vertical viewing angles on the UL30A are quite good. *

The Sony VAIO NW is a classy-looking midrange laptop with a solid selection of features, and even some advanced options available if you want to configure your own, which we'd highly recommend. At its base, the machine doesn't really standout, but pop in a Blu-Ray drive for less than $100 and you've got a much more capable addition to your home theater setup. Throw in a discrete graphics card from ATI and then you'll really be flying along, but you'll also increase the base price to a...

Short battery life. *

The bottom line: Although it's expensive for a 15-inch multimedia laptop, the Blu-ray and game-playing capabilities of the attractive 15.4-inch Sony Vaio NW160J make it a worthy portable entertainment system.

With its excellent screen, Blu-ray playback, and low price, the VAIO NW180J/S is a standout media notebook.

Battery life though is mediocre; we managed to get two and a half hours out of it, which is acceptable, but still nowhere near the big leagues of Acer's Timeline series. Mediocre battery. *

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 is a nice, mid-range multimedia machine, and Lenovo even includes some nice extras if you want to customize your rig. Multimedia fans will appreciate the good, LED backlit display, which did a fine job with our movies, as well as the standard outputs for an HDTV, and the battery life that was strong enough to get through a long, loud action flick. We loved the deep, responsive keyboard that felt more like typing on full size desktop keys. Some of the extras fel...

Fan noise is excellent with a very relaxed cooling system. *

The Toshiba Satellite A505-S6967 laptop computer comes complete with an Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 2.1GHz processor, 4GB of DDR2 800 MHz memory, a 320GB 5400RPM hard drive, and runs on the Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium (SP1, 64-bit) operating system. *

The bottom line: Good components and a big battery push the Toshiba Satellite A505-S6960 in front of other retail budget laptops.

The bottom line: Good components and a big battery push the Toshiba Satellite A505-S6960 in front of other retail budget laptops.

The bottom line: Good design and some really nice-sounding speakers round out the Toshiba Satellite A505-S6980, a very affordable mainstream laptop with excellent battery life for its size.

Customer Reviews

To put it all in a nutshell this laptop is excellent. *

The HP Pavilion dv6t (1030us) is tailor-made for frugal fashionistas. *

Great gaming performance. Poor battery life. *

The Bottom Line

The bottom line: You can find a better-designed, longer-running, Blu-ray equipped 15.6-inch for less than the HP Pavilion dv6-1375dx.

The HP Pavilion dv6-1225ef is fairly noisy. Connectivity is complete, with connectors spread out along the edges of the notebook. *