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Laptops that cost less than $500 are few and far between, and trying to find a decent one can be a lofty task. In order to create a budget laptop, manufacturers often sacrifice performance, bog down its products with bloatware, or dumb-down the design in order to keep costs low. But we believe that shouldn't have to sacrifice all these creature comforts for the sake of a good buy. That's why PCMag has rounded up some of the best $500 laptops that have come through our labs.

The cheapest laptops out there belong to the netbook category: 10.1-inch widescreen computers that run on Intel Atom or AMD Dual-Core E-350 processors. They act as great mobile devices, but features are usually limited to how many ports there are, but some netbooks, like the HP Pavilion dm1z, include embedded 3G to increase their mobile value.

If you're more the multitasker, a netbook's small screen may not be the way to go. The Asus K52F-BIN6 provides a 15.6-inch screen for multiple windows and it has a full size keyboard, plus numeric keypad. The Intel Pentium dual-core P6200 may be a bit dated and if you're planning on doing anything heavier than web browsing and word processing, then you may want to bump up the processing power.

For those who need a little more push behind the hardware, the Lenovo G560-0679AKU is a fine candidate. Its Core i3 processor is a fast one and combined with 4GB of memory, it will be a productivity master's delight. The Lenovo G560 does come with a caveat, there's an excessive amount of bloatware that could slow down your startup time to a crawl, but there's an easy fix. Simply go into the Control Panel from the start menu and you can get rid of any software you don't want/ need.

Labels: laptops and computers