Asustek's Eee sub-notebook was a real success. So real, that people merely bought it out of inertia, because it was thought to be powerful, cheap (yet priceless) and was the best pick when it comes to price versus quality. Few guys out there figured out that the IT market is in a perpetual change and the offerings in the last September can not even match those in January 2008.

The Eee sells for $399 and comes with an 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 processor, 512 MB of DDR II SDRAM and a 7-inch display screen (larger notebooks are expected to kick in later this year). It is extremely portable, but it features a cramped keyboard with extremely small keycaps, so typing is a little difficult for an adult. It also has a fast, but limited solid-state drive, able to store maximum 4GB of information, including the operating system.

The system is pretty limited in its features, although it offers an impressive portability. The most appealing feature of the sub-notebook was its tiny price tag. However, for a little extra change you can have your own, fully-fledged laptop running Windows Vista - a real computer to let you run all your applications and even games at a more-than-decent speed.

HP has released a low-cost laptop model, called the HP Presario F579WM. Don't let yourselves tricked into thinking that cheap means low-performance, because the laptop offers a whole lot of goodies for as much as $465 (this is the price the eCost website is selling the model). It is a re-certified model and weights about three times than the Eee sub-notebook, but hey, it's a real computer, not a toy.

The HP Presario F579WM is built around an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TK-53 running at 1.7 GHz. The laptop also features 1GB of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a super-multi-DVD burner, and a 15.4" WXGA High-Definition Brightview Widescreen display, that supports a maximum resolution of 1280 x 800. Additionally, it comes with built-in discrete graphics, the Nvidia GeForce Go 6150.

The notebook is powered by Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium and comes with a full version of Norton Internet Security 2007. The price difference between the Presario and the Eee PC ($65) does not even cover the Windows Vista license, not to mention the huge hardware difference between the two notebooks.