Shopping for a Budget Laptop Computer

I held onto my Dell Inspiron laptop computer for 10 years before I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new one, but my tight budget and the variety of laptops on the market made my decision of which brand and model to buy a difficult one.

My price limit was $500, which would have been impossible to work with years ago, when laptops were much more expensive than they are now. Thankfully, while taking a quick glance through Best Buy, Office Max and other stores' ads, I saw quite a few nice laptops that were within my price range. Some of them lacked a DVD drive, which was an immediate deal-breaker for me. I didn't even realize that some laptops no longer have disc drives, but as you can tell from my holding onto my old computer for a decade, I've been out of the computer market for a while.

Once I realized that some laptops lack DVD drives, I decided it was time to make a mental list of the must-have features of my new laptop:

4 GB RAM.

Light-weight.

Small enough to fit in a backpack.

DVD drive.

Built-in web cam.

Wi-Fi ready.

After studying the store ads and researching models online, I decided that a Gateway (Model #: NV53A24u) that was on sale at Best Buy for $449 was the one for me. However, once in the store, I realized that it was much larger than I expected. I was looking for a small but fully functioning laptop that I could tote around with me. I couldn't imagine myself toting around the Gateway comfortably.

Luckily, I didn't leave the store empty-handed. The salesgirl showed me a Toshiba Satellite L645D and I instantly knew that I had found what I was looking for. Though the hard drive was slightly smaller than the Gateway -- 250 GB compared to 320 GB -- and it was $30 more expensive, the Toshiba's compact nature sold me.

I've been using my new laptop for a week and I have no complaints. It powers on and off extremely quickly and, can run several programs simultaneously without a problem. Sometimes I use Skype, iTunes, multiple Internet Explorer windows and Microsoft Word all at once. Honestly, any computer would have felt faster than my Dell, which was a great computer in its heyday, but is now hopelessly out of date at 512 MB RAM. After using that for 10 years, the Toshiba Satellite feels lightning fast and consequently has made working on the computer much more enjoyable.