Samsung Series 3 NP355E5X-A02IN Laptop (AMD Dual Core/2 GB/500 GB/DOS)

I bought it for my grandfather, for mostly accounting work using Tally ERP. Since i did all the installation of OS and all, i did get a chance to test the system. The system performs well, is fast enough for a normal user/ms office and other tasks. BR movies play smoothly in VLC. For all the programmers out there, this is a boon. A 15.6" under 19000 (i bought it in 18450). I installed Visual Studio 2012 and along with that, SQL Management Studio, and run them simultaneously. Since these two softwares are huge as far as memory and processing is concerned, the system showed a decent performance. In short, i did not have to wait while building the projects in VS2010. If in case you need more multitasking, you can add another DDR3 RAM in the empty slot, and it would be a cheap yet powerful upgrade. This comes with DOS, so you save about 5 grands for the OS. I installed Win 7 Ultimate........without spending that 5 grand......you know what i mean. ;) If you don't do much gaming and extensive image or video editing, go for this one. It also comes with dedicated ATI graphics of approx 348 MB. So thats cool.

Pros: Great build quality for the price. Doesn't look cheap by any standards. The trackpad and the keyboard are quite sturdy. Overall great feel Cons: Within the first 30 minutes of using the machine I realized how horrible its performance was. It feels like you are using a 5 year old system. Installing windows took me over 2 hours! As soon as I start opening a couple of applications, it starts freezing. Overall: Don't cheap out. Spend a couple of more thousand bucks and get a i3 or i5 system. Its much more than worth it.