Notebook Hunter

A. The Compaq CQ56-103TU you refer to is an out-and-out budget machine – the best thing about this kind of notebook is the price and that you get a full-sized keyboard and screen, a reasonably-sized hard disk and an optical drive. It will get you through the basics, such web surfing, email and running office suites, but no faster than at a steady walking pace. An Intel Celeron is not a processor that Intel promotes in its marketing – it's something that fills a gap at the bottom of the market that would otherwise be taken by other chip manufacturers. The Presario’s CQ56-103TU Celeron and its 2GBs of RAM will run Windows Home Premium fine and one or two applications at the same time. So it's actually a good alternative to a netbook for anyone considering a netbook purely on price. But overall, it will be a bit a slow-coach, and if you try and run many applications at once or even fire up Photoshop, it can get frustrating really quickly. It won't do anything in a hurry. And if you want to watch movies, particularly HD ones downloaded off the net, it won't really cut it. We recommend this notebook only if budget is your main consideration. Otherwise a much better bet, if you can afford it (and still staying within tight budget parameters) would be a notebook with an Intel Pentium Dual Core (the next rung up from a Celeron) or even better, one of the Core i3 notebooks starting to appear in the $500 to $600 price bracket. One example of the latter is a Lenovo G560 Core i3 notebook available from PC Wholesale (PCWS), a Victorian -based retailer that also sells online. Powered by an an excellent Core i3 3-350M chip, the 15.6in Lenovo has a 500GB hard drive (http://bit.ly/hkFCOM) and 2GB of RAM. As it is, this spec will do the things you list in your question, but if you can spare an extra $50 you can upgrade the RAM to 4GBs, which then gives you a fantastic notebook that will be more than zippy, easily play your downloaded HD movies, and generally serve all your uni and personal needs extremely well.