Finding a good laptop for less than $400 is a difficult task, in fact you may be better served using your budget for buying one of the best netbooks under $400 if you cannot extend your budget to somewhere around the $500. If you do require a laptop and genuinely cannot extend your budget past $400 then there is no need to worry, you just need to be extremely careful when choosing a laptop from the many laptops on the market.
The best way to identify the best value laptops for any budget is to simply analyze the quality of existing customer reviews, and there is no better place to do that than on Amazon.com. We did the legwork for you and here is the result, the two laptops under $400 with the highest average customer rating on the whole of Amazon.com!
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ASUS A53U-XE1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop
It comes as no surprise to us to see an ASUS taking the top spot here with an almost perfect 4.5/5 average customer rating, a major survey by insurance giants SquareTrade in 2009 concluded that ASUS are the most reliable laptop brand around with less of their laptops experiencing a hardware failure in the first three years of their life than any other laptop brand in existence. That is a massive endorsement for the ASUS brand.
The value for money that you are getting here really is extraordinary, this 15.6 inch laptop retails at around the same price as ASUS netbooks – it is currently available for just $339.99 with free shipping at time of writing (prices subject to fluctuation, click the link to see current price at time of reading). Despite being a great laptop for the price, we still recommend extending your budget by a little and considering the two laptops featured in the article Top Rated Laptops Under $500 if you can afford it.
As with most low budget laptops the processor is an AMD not an Intel, but that shouldn’t be a major concern as the AMD C50 Dual Core Processor included in this laptop is a popular and reliable component. The biggest selling point for the A53U-XE1 is the 15.6-Inch HD Display, you will be hard pressed to find another laptop below $400 with a genuine HD screen and as a result this laptop can be considered perfect for movie buffs and gamers. Although the most graphically demanding of online games might be a tall order for a low end model.
This laptop really offers everything that a standard laptop user could need, asides from the ability to play movies and games it is also a great networking and small business laptop, tasty features include integrated Altec Lansing speakers and a 0.3 megapixel webcam. The 320GB hard drive (5400RPM) will meet the requirements of most consumers, but if you have a vast movie collection then you might want to consider the addition of an external drive.
The ASUS A53U comes with two memory slots, potentially enabling an upgrade from the 3GB included to 8GB should your laptop ever begin to slow with age. We can’t grumble at what ASUS are offering here which is basically a great budget option which is probably worth a fair bit more than it is selling for, and to be frank the laptop looks fantastic too! Any customer is backed not only by the standard 1 year warranty but also a free 1 year accidental damage warranty which covers accidental drops, spills, fire damage, and power surges! Head over to Amazon for more information or to buy.
