There's a lot to consider when buying a laptop.  How much power do you need, screen size, etc.  I think i've made everything a little simpler here.  No laptop is perfect either they all have both great and ghastly features.  All the prices reflected here are direct quotes from Newegg.com, my personal favorite site for purchasing computers.  They will likely be higher elsewhere.

This Satellite is, needless to say a budget model. Most of these will be, finding a good laptop for under $600 is no easy task. However this model seems to cut the muster. If you don't need a gob of power and you want to do some basic internetting and document creation, this is a fine laptop for those tasks. It has a not too shabby 160 GB hard drive and a DVD burner, alongside 2 GB of ram. Unfortunately the "budget" in "budget model" came in on the processor. The L305D sports a sempron. Not impressive, especially for Vista.

The Great: Comes with a DVD Burner and plenty of hard drive space. Great price.

The Ghastly: Implements a low end Sempron processor with a high end processor. End result will be one frustratingly slow machine.

I'm not a fan of Acer laptops. However this one seems to show you the beef. This thing comes with a whopping 250Gb hard drive, a dvd burner and 3, that's right 3gb of ram. The cpu is also nothing to sneeze at, a 2.6GHz Pentium D. That's no pinto. It also actually comes with Vista Home Premium, and has the girth to run it. I still don't trust the brand, I've heard terrible stories about their support and have seen first hand the construction of their budget level laptops.

The Great: Great power for the money.

The Ghastly: Poor Acer construction/support.

This Satellite is a bit confusing. It seems as though it should be in the position of it's cheaper brother in the budget arena. It sports a much nicer 2.16 Pentium D, however only...1GB ram, 120GB hard drive, and...it's more than the first one? What you have to take into account here is that "Pro" on the end of the name. This is a business grade laptop. So it's much more sturdy and dependable. And despite the lack of horsepower it comes with an XP Pro downgrade which is more what the laptop was designed for out of the box. If you buy this go straight for the downgrade, do not even boot it with Vista, for the love of pete. Whoever pete is.

The Great - Tough notebook, good design, dependable. Great CPU.

The Ghastly - Small amount of ram, smaller hard drive than cheaper counterpart, comes with Vista preinstalled with 1GB of ram.

Lenovo is a company of very smart people. This laptop comes with a no compromises set of specs, for the price, and the operating system. It sports a 2.0 GHz Pentium D, 1GB of ram, a 160GB Drive, a DVD Burner, and is preinstalled with XP Pro, but comes with a Vista Upgrade. Where the Satellite Pro had it backwards, this one has it right way round. If you have a computer that cannot run vista, why put vista on it with an optional downgrade? Lenovo makes some well constructed laptops and has some very nice tech support.

The Great: Good specs, good OS choice for those specs.

The Ghastly: Would need upgrades to use Vista.

I have a soft spot for Compaqs. My first computer was a Compaq. They make good budget machines and if you have to get a budget level PC compaq is the way to go. This model comes with a Pentium D 2.16, 2 GB of ram and 250 GB hard drive and of course, a DVD Burner. It also comes with a 15.6 inch screen a opposed to the other laptops' 15.4s. It's a great buy, comes with Vista Home Premium, which it can definitely run, only perhaps could use 1 more GB of ram.

The Great: Great company, specs, and os choice.

The Ghastly: Could use extra Gig of ram.

Googling the model numbers will give you the full shimmy. Enjoy the info at a glance.