Notebook Hunter

With the world now moving to Sandy Bridge processors (and soon AMD's highly capable Llanos chips) a computer powered by a Pentium processor harks back to another era, when the most affordable notebooks were powered by the most feeble processors, like Pentiums and Celerons. For $424 at Dick Smith Electronics until Sunday the HP Pavilion G62-454TU is probably the most affordable 15.6 notebook we've ever seen - but the dated Intel Pentium P6200 (2.13GHz) inside it is no Core or 2nd Generation Core (Sandy Bridge) CPU. It's a cheapie, a 1.5 litre engine inside a Ford Falcon. It will get you to your destination, but not in a great hurry.  With a measly 2GBs of RAM it will handle productivity applications - one bearably, two or more at glacial pace. Heck, it might even play movies, though we'd stay away from anything full HD.

So why do we list this as  special? It's cheap. Very cheap. If you need a machine with a big screen, to read your emails and surf the web and maybe run an Office application occasionally, it will do the job, though the 320GB hard drive is on the small side. The G62-454TU doesn’t gain or lose any points for portability; it weighs 2.5kg, which is squarely average. Physically it’s also unremarkable, measuring 36.8mm thick, 246mm deep and 374mm wide.

If you can spare an extra $100-$200 get yourself instead something affordable with an Intel Core processor and 4GBs of RAM. The performance gulf between a Pentium and a Core CPU is massive. Sell the furniture. Sub-let the garage. Mow lawns in your spare time. But try and squeeze that extra $100-$200. If not, if you are down to your last $424 in life, then the G62-454TU is the cheapest big notebook you can buy.



See the HP Pavilion G62-454TU in the Notebook Hunter database here.

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