3. What To Replace Or Add If Your Budget Allows

If you can afford it, whether you are within the $700 budget or go above it, there are some things you should consider replacing or adding. Here are my recommendations in the order that I would add them until I ran out of money.

Dell's Inspiron 6400 notebook

Under $700 notebooks often come with Intel Celeron CPUs that run at around 1.5 GHz or AMD CPUs running at around 1.8 GHz. These are comparatively slower than other mobile CPUs. Instead consider Intel's newer Core Duo CPUs in the 1.6 GHz range or AMD CPUs in the 2.0 plus GHz range. In addition to being faster, Core Duo CPUs usually come with better graphics support than Celeron CPUs. Lower priced AMD CPUs generally have better graphics support than Intel Celeron class CPUs.

If you can, go for more memory. Consider 512 MB the minimum configuration. If you can go to 1 GB or memory, that's all the better. Most notebooks have only two slots for memory and sometimes memory is soldered into one of them. So you will be limited in how much memory you can add than with most desktop PCs.

Many under $700 notebooks come with fairly small hard disk drives, around 40 GB, and may come only with a CD read/write DVD read only optical drive. Choose a larger drive if you can and go for a CD/DVD read/write optical drive. An optical drive that supports dual layer DVDs is a good choice. These let you store around 9 GB of data.

You want to make sure the notebook you choose can run a decent amount of time on battery power. Most under $700 notebooks use fairly low power components and should give from 2 to 4 hours of battery life per charge, depending on the notebook, its specific components including the battery and how you use it. The biggest drain on battery power is the notebook's display. By keeping display brightness at the minimum level for comfortable viewing, you can dramatically increase battery life. If you want to run your notebook longer on a charge than with its standard battery, consider buying an optional higher capacity battery. You might want to hold off on this purchase until you've had a chance to see if the standard battery is enough for you and perhaps until you've accumulated the cash to buy a second battery.

Finally, on the software side, choose Windows XP Professional over XP Home. Even though it may run you over $100 more for XP Pro, you'll have a system that is easier to network and that has other features you will appreciate as you use your notebook. If you don't have an office product, add Microsoft Office. You might want to wait to buy Office. Assuming you're a student, you should be able to get a substantial student discount.