This week's five best laptop deals - TechRadar UK

My, laptops are cheap these days. So cheap in fact, that you can pick one up for less than the price of a month’s rent. Unless you live in London or somewhere posh and cosmopolitan like that.  So we thought it would be a rather good idea to wrap up some of the best deals we’ve spied across the web this Friday.

The trouble with the web is that such offers are here today, gone next week, so act quickly. Mind you, even once this lot are sold they’ll be replaced by other brands, other models, so it’s always worth keeping your beady eye out for another steal.

1. Cheap and cheerful

First up is an incredible deal on a Fujitsu Siemens laptop from eBuyer. This one really will be toast in days. It’s a 15.4-inch Esprimo with a 1.6GHz Intel dual core Pentium T2330 under the hood alongside 2GB of RAM, a 120GB hard disk and DVD-RW drive. What’s more, it also comes with Vista Home Premium – not Home Basic as can often be the case. Whatever you do, avoid Home Basic at all costs. It’s not what you need, it’s not what you want.

It’s £349. That, as our Reviews Editor says, is "crazy talk". Ok, so it’s a Pentium dual core, not a latest-gen Core 2 Duo but it’ll still do pretty much everything you’d want from a budget machine.

And for a limited time, it comes with a free Lexmark printer "worth £32.99" – should you want it.

2. Multimedia heaven

If you fancy multimedia power in the form of a Blu-ray drive, try this £823 Sony VGN AR61M from laptopshop.co.uk. You get a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, the now-ubiquitous 2GB of memory and an X-black 17-inch display, powered by a 256MB Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT card.

There’s also a 300GB hard drive on board (though it is slow at 4200rpm) as well as the Blu-ray drive and Vista Home Premium.

Don’t think you’ll be carrying it around though – it’s nearly 4kg.

3. Spend a little, get a lotto

Another one that caught our eye is this £429 Samsung R60 Plus at ShopLaptop.co.uk. Now things really start to get interesting. Still at the cheap end of the scale, yet you get such better kit for your money just by paying a smidgeon more.

2GB of memory (of course) and a 200GB hard drive are accompanied by the 1.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 and ATI Radeon Express 1250 graphics. Home Premium also joins the party. This may seem like a fairly standard set of specs as far as most laptops are concerned, but when you consider it’s a well-built Samsung, the price seems even more trifling.

You even get a free Freeview adapter in the box, too.

4. Supermarket wonder

Our last few deals are all at the very cheapest end of the scale. Why? Because, put simply, they offer so much for the money. The Lenovo R61i 7650 15.4-inch widescreen is £349 at Asda at the moment and it isn’t an only in-store job – you can also buy online.

Inside there’s a 1.46GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T2310, 120GB hard drive and X1300 integrated Intel graphics. 1GB of memory is more than enough to cope with the rigours of Windows Vista Home Premium.

5. Awesome Comet deals

Toshiba almost always features in any cheap laptop round-up. Quite how the manufacturer manages to pile laptops so high and sell them so cheaply is beyond us. The Toshiba Satellite A210-1CO AMD at £399 is an absolute steal. As is the HP G6065 at the same price – probably the best-looking cheap laptop around.

Both are available from Comet and are AMD Turion 64 x2 Dual Core-based notebooks. Both also have 2GB of memory plus 120 and 160 GB hard drives respectively. Superb for the money.