For some months now I've been watching PC prices falling to amazingly low levels, but a laptop for under £100, is it possible? Elonex, a long-established and reliable supplier, have brought out the "One" with a big push under the banner, "A laptop for every child." ASUS have also brought out a very basic laptop, the "Eee PC", retailing at £199.99, truly amazing prices in my view, even with the VAT on top. But what do you get for your money? I thought I would have a look at some entry-level laptops and compare the market.

As well as the two above, I selected the Dell Vostro 1500 at £199, and the Hewlett Packard 2133 at £299. The comparison table is below and several points are immediately apparent to me. One is that three of the four use Linux as the operating system, breaking away from Microsoft and saving a fair amount of money while offering performance advantages into the bargain. Not only is Windows pretty expensive and Linux free, but Windows is also a massive amount of software to load, it can take a Windows PC several minutes to boot-up compared with a Linux PC taking well under a minute. No wonder wags refer to Windoze. And while Windows has made huge strides in reliability in recent years, it still lags behind Unix-based operating systems such as Linux. The biggest difference between the two, however, is the cost of all those additional programs we find so necessary. Instead of buying extremely expensive Microsoft products such as Word or Excel, you can download free or extremely cheap programs offering the same functionality. In some instances, as is the case with web browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the free stuff is vastly superior to the MS offering.

The most obvious differences between these four, however, is their physical size. The ASUS and Eleonex are note books rather than laptops as such, being about half the size of the Dell and HP. This has implications in two regards. One is the screen size, a mere 7" in the case of the smaller two, and also the keyboard size. 7" is really a very small screen compared with what we are probably all used to now, and with a resolution of only 800 by 480 pixels, you will probably find a lot of web sites won't fit on the screen properly and you'll have to do a lot of scrolling from left to right, as well as up and down. It will also impact the ease with which you can read or type an email or a Word document. The size and weight of these laptops, as well as the screen and keyboard size then, probably mean these are suited more to situations where you need access away from home or the office and not when you are going to spend hours on end working on them.

What the two bigger laptops offer are also much more powerful processors. The Dell, while not the most expensive, is the most powerful featuring an Intel Celeron M running at 1.86 gigahertz compared with the ASUS sporting the same chip running at a mere 800 megahertz. The two full-size laptops also feature proper hard disks, both 120 gigabyte in size, compared with Flash drives on the two note books. That's up to 120 times as much storage, and that makes a huge difference if you are working with images or sound files. More important perhaps is the amount of memory you get with each. The Elonex will struggle to get by on 128 megabytes, while the two larger laptops both offer 1 gigabyte of RAM. A few years ago a PC would have been highly-spec'd if it came with that much memory, but these days it is woefully inadequate although some allowance should be made for the fact it is not running Windows. Weight-wise the Dell is a bit of a monster, weighing almost as much as the other three put together. The chief culprit will be the screen, which at 15.4" is by far the largest of this group. It will also have an impact on battery-life and will drain the battery much faster than the others, so to compensate it is twice the weight and size of the battery in the HP, for example. Finally, they all come with WiFi, and the HP has more networking hardware built-in on top of that including a webcam. Only the Dell, however, comes with a read/write DVD.

So which to go for? It's a tricky choice, as in so many situations it depends what your priorities are. If the objective is to provide children with a cheap computer, as Elonex are promoting with their campaign, even that's not a foregone conclusion. Their offering at £99 is woefully under-powered and under-equipped, and you really do have to decide whether the Dell, at twice the price, is twice the computer. I think it is. In fact, even for adults I think the Dell is the better offer. It is the same price as the ASUS which is itself only barely better than the Elonex in performance terms. The only alternative would be if weight was an over-riding factor. If you envisage lugging the laptop on your back on hours-long commuting journeys you might well be tempted by the HP at two fifths of the weight, although it does weigh-in at an extra £100 in cash.