Best Notebooks Under a Grand

Every year (okay, a few times a year), we like to see just exactly how much notebook your money can buy. And while looking at $800 notebooks or $600 notebooks is fun, $1,000 is still the sweet spot for those who want to future-proof their investment. This year (and every year), you can get a lot more for your thousand bucks than you could the year before. Last year’s grand, for example, could buy you a 1.6-GHz Core 2 Duo T5500 processor, 1GB of RAM in most cases, and a 100GB hard drive. This year, that same money will buy you a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7250 processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to a 250GB hard drive. So if you decided to hold off one more year to get the most bang for your Vista buck, you made the right choice. We put Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Sony, and Toshiba into the ring to see whose system would come out on top.