Seven cheap notebook compared

And now, after we’ve delved deeper into the matter and fingered some of the models available, we can state that the $600 bar is not so very real. Yes, you can buy a new notebook for that money, but you will get either a VIA or a Transmeta processor, neither of which can be considered an appealing option at all. We have no doubt such notebooks will also find their user who is utterly limited in his/her IT budget, but it goes without saying that they are far inferior to systems on the Intel Celeron: notebooks based on VIA’s and Transmeta’s processors are three and two times slower, respectively, than those based on mobile Celerons. A Transmeta-based notebook would be about $100 cheaper than a Celeron-based one of the same configuration, but this cannot justify the difference in performance, of course.