I just finished reading an article that made me aware of how uninformed the average consumer may be, it was regarding Wal-Mart's unexpected removal of the extremely affordable $199 desktop computer, the Everex gPC from the 600 stores it would've been found in. I call this unexpected because within the first two weeks after Everex's wallet-friendly machine arrived, Wal-Mart had sold every last one of the 10,000 units available for purchase through the store site, forcing the on line supermarket to hold up on its sale in order to replenish stock. Now ain't that just a shock to the nuts of your conventional, four-digit priced number cruncher? Granted, these things don’t exactly run high-end games and software like Crysis or Photoshop right out the box, but you can’t really expect that from a $199 system.

Anyways, the quick sale of these Everex machines just didn't continue into a long-term happening for Wal-Mart. They refer to a slow consumer response to the $199 machine, saying that sales didn't meet their expectations, even though they had nearly managed to sell out of the desktop since then. Wal-Mart will, thankfully, continue selling the machine through its on-line store, where it experienced huge success at first. Fortunately, that early sprint of Everex's gPC is turning out to be just the start to a new trend in home computing: people want budget-focused machines.

And so the times are a-changin' my friends: we have more manufacturers producing and marketing low-cost machines, and a huge increase in the use of alternative operating systems installed on manufactured machines, like Dell choosing to support the open-source operating system, Ubuntu. What is even more exciting to the cheap, ramen-eating techie (like me) is the new branch of surprisingly affordable subcompact notebooks that more producers are working themselves into; and that is what this edition of Tekno-Logic is all about, a brief overview on some of these budget notebooks.

Everex has followed up the gPC with a closely related subcompact, the Cloudbook. The Cloudbook uses a small 7” screen that displays a maximum resolution of 800x480 pixels (WGA), which is just a bit too small for browsing most websites on, meaning there is a chance you'll be doing some side-scrolling from left to right in order to finish reading a page or viewing an image. Using the Ubuntu based system called gOS, which is also installed on Everex's gPC, this machine is built for users that need to browse the internet, use some mild-applications like word processing (using the great OpenOffice.org apps), and maybe listen to music while checking out the latest Money$hots gallery. It's a low-spec notebook that utilizes a 1.2GHz VIA processor, 512MB of memory with a 30GB hard drive; but it does have internal wireless networking support and since the operating system is Ubuntu-based, it's touted as being “virus free”. All in all, a decent option for basic computing with a price tag of $399, though at that price I can afford a much more capable, but larger, notebook, instead.

Asus' light, two-pound entry into the subcompact market is experiencing some great success and is even planning on further expansion of its line, the Eee PC. This notebook features the same 7” screen and the same 800x480 resolution, but in the place of a VIA processor and chipset, we have the Intel Celeron in varying speeds and the standard Intel video chipset. To an even better surprise, the Eee PC uses a very fast solid-state flash drive, sacrificing capacity for speed; from the range of models, the available capacities are only 2GB and 4GB at this time (there used to be an 8GB model available); if you need to expand your storage capacity, you could consider buying a separate external drive that connects through one of the three available USB ports, or using the internal card reader (SDHC support) available on the higher-priced models. Another appealing thing about these solid-state drives, in addition to their speed, they are shockproof by design: this whole notebook has no moving parts. This machine is available with another consumer-friendly version of Linux, but every model is capable to run Windows XP instead, making this product more appealing for lesser tech-savvy users. The Eee PC is available with at least 512MB of memory, but that is expandable up to 2GB of memory, which would work excellent with the memory-hogging Windows XP system; the notebook also includes built-in wireless networking. I find the product very interesting and the price, starting at $299, allows me to continue my horrible, social-life threatening addiction to World of Warcraft. (Ding!)

More competition to this market is just starting to show up with new revealings of subcompact notebooks happening in the past week, at the CeBIT (translated to “Centre of Office and Information Technology”) computer expo in Germany. Manufacturers like MSI, ECS, and others are taking their first step into the affordable subcompact market with their own projects: MSI is calling theirs Wind, and ECS' the less-appealing G10IL. Overall, this is a very exciting time to be looking into buying a notebook, and I can't wait to see what comes out next. The market is going through some huge breakthroughs and it's all at a very attractive price.