Today’s budget notebook can easily have a 15” screen and a 160 GB hard drive, but expect older, slower processors and less capable versions of Windows to keep the price down.

Although there are often £299 deals on low-end models, expect to pay between £350 and £500 depending on the processor, memory and hard drive. At the £500 prince point you’ll get Vista Home Premium, below that you’ll get Windows XP or the very basic Vista Basic unless you find a bargain like the £395 Advent 7113. You get Home Premium, 1 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, DVD writer, an S-Video port and a 15.4” widescreen, but you also get a single core Celeron M 1.73 GHz and integrated graphics that aren’t up to current games.

You’ll pay less - £350 – for the Gateway ML6226b, which has the same Celeron M but only 512 MB of RAM and Vista Home Basic, or the Dell Inspiron 1501 with the AMD Sempron 3500+, 512 MB of RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 and a 14” screen. (Dell has two versions of most the low-end Inspirons, with 512 MB RAM and 80 GB hard drives or 1 GB and 160 GB for an extra £40-50.)

Almost every notebook has built-in Ethernet and even the Dell Inspiron 1501 has a modem and a memory card reader. PC Card slots are common at this point, rather than ExpressCard and USB rather than FireWire. The cheapest models will have a DVD player/CD writer combo drive, pricier notebooks will have a DVD writer.

Most budget laptops are fairly weighty – 2.5 to 3 kg or even heavier. The Alienware Sentia m3450 is extremely light – just under 2 kg - and while the price (£599 up) is high for a budget laptop with a 14” screen, it’s low for such a light notebook with a 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, DVD burner, FireWire and Bluetooth.

At £488, the Fujitsu AMILO Li1818 could be the cheapest 17” notebook so far and despite the larger screen you’re not paying over the odds for the 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo and integrated GMA 950, although the 120 GB hard drive is smaller than expected and the screen does put the weight up to 4 kg.