Top 10 PC Deals for $500

Nobody likes the back-to-school season -- kids hate it because it means going back to the classroom grind, and adults hate it because it means a barrage of back-to-school commercials on TV -- but it's a prime time to look for values. So we decided it was time for one of HardwareCentral's virtual shopping sprees, hitting the Web in search of the best desktop and laptop PC buys for $500 or less.

That price limit ruled out some boutique brands such as Apple and Sony, but other vendor websites such as Dell's and Lenovo's were fair game -- as were a dozen resellers, from those with brick-and-mortar ties such as Costco.com and Walmart.com to online superstores such as Newegg.com, TigerDirect.com, and more.

As we scour the sites, we round prices up to the nearest dollar, so sorry, marketeers -- as much as you might like us to say your PCs are $448.88 or $499.99, they're $449 or $500, respectively. Any errors in transcription are our bad; any day-to-day changes in prices are the vendors' doing.

Desktops

Five hundred bucks will buy you any netbook you might want, but we frown on desktops and laptops with the specs of a netbook. We dismissed systems with only 1GB of memory, along with those with single-core processors.

Costco's $500 HP Pavilion P6510T desktop caught our eye with its free 20-inch LCD monitor, but its Celeron 450 CPU made us ask, "Gee, are they still making those?" Ditto for the Sempron processors of another free-monitor deal, Best Buy's HP Compaq Presario CQ5500Y, and the oddest name we ran into, the Robotjoy GOH desktop ($500 without mouse or keyboard at Amazon.com). Dell's $499 Vostro 430 minitower had the scariest specs we encountered -- not only a netbook-class 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard disk, but Vista Home Basic.

Dell's Vostro 230 desktop was tempting at $429 with a 20-inch LCD monitor, but it packed only 2GB of RAM and a DVD-ROM drive -- we could afford to bump it up to 3GB ($44) or swap in a DVD burner ($35), but trying for both put us $8 over budget.

Costco's $500 ZT Element Pentium E6600 (3.06GHz) desktop wins for two things: its big 1TB hard disk and its 350-watt power supply. All of the desktops we shopped come with integrated graphics, so one of the first things you'll want to do is plug in a PCI Express x16 graphics card, but a lot of consumer PCs' power supplies cut off your headroom at 250 watts. Similarly, the lack of a PCIe x16 slot doomed Best Buy's $480 Dell Inspiron Pentium E5400 desktop despite its impressive 6GB of RAM.

Micro Center proclaims its $480 Acer AX3910 "One of our best cheap desktop computer deals!" with a 3.06GHz Pentium E6600 dual-core, 4GB of memory, and a 640GB hard disk. But we preferred the vendor's house-brand PowerSpec B628 ($500), which combined 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive with one of the few quad-core CPUs we saw, Intel's 2.5GHz Core 2 Quad Q8300.

Walmart.com scored a similar win for quad power with its $498 ZT Affinity 7103La, which pairs AMD's Phenom II X4 955 with a 500GB hard disk, 4GB of RAM and GeForce 6150SE integrated graphics.

The people who brought you the Eee now bring you the Essentio -- it sounds like one of Shakespeare's minor characters (from The Basics of Verona? The Prerequisites of Windsor?), but the Asus Essentio is a Pentium E5500 dual-core desktop with a 1TB hard disk and 4GB of memory sold for $500 at Best Buy.

Finally, New York-based discounter J&R contributes the Acer Aspire AX3910-U2032, another Pentium E6600 desktop with 4GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, and HDMI out for $489.

Notebooks

The best deals on laptops seem to come in the 15.6-inch size. Best Buy's $490 Gateway NV5378u, an Athlon II X2 M300 laptop with a hefty 4GB of RAM and 500GB hard disk, is an example in Midnight Blue.

Tiger Direct ekes out Costco for a win for the Lenovo G550 -- a 15.6-inch Pentium dual-core laptop with a 250GB hard drive, 4GB of memory and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Both sell it for $500, but Tiger's configuration has a 2.3GHz Pentium T4500 versus Costco's 2.2GHz Pentium T4400 processor, and you never know when an extra 100MHz will come in handy.

Speaking of the Pentium T4500, Newegg.com gets a win for its MSI A5000, which combines the chip with 4GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive for $450 after a mail-in rebate.

Lenovo's 14-inch ThinkPad SL410 and 15.6-inch model SL510 have specifications a bit on the scanty side for $499 each (Intel's 1.9GHz Celeron T3100 dual-core, 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard disk), but they get an honorable mention just for being ThinkPads -- specifically, for having the famous ThinkPad keyboard.

Dell also scored a couple of near misses with its matching Vostro 1014 and 1015: The 14- and 15.6-inch notebooks have matching $438 price tags, 2GB of memory, and 160GB hard drives, but their Celeron 900 CPUs were too meek for our tastes.

Dell did rack up a 15.6-inch win thanks to Walmart.com -- a $498 Inspiron 1545, a Pentium T4400 dual-core laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. College students of both sexes will want to cover it with stickers touting their favorite bands and political causes, because it's pink.

For our last notebook pick, we were tempted to bust our budget by $20 for Amazon.com's Toshiba Satellite L645D-S4036, a 14-inch notebook with AMD's Phenom II P820 triple-core CPU, 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard disk. But we're strict about sticking to $500, so we opted for a 17.3-inch luggable instead -- the Acer Aspire AS7551, with Athlon II power, 3GB of RAM and a 320GB drive, at Micro Center.