My husband's niece is having her 18th birthday coming soon and she wants a small laptop for present.

Any tips? recommendations?

I have seen HP, Compaq and Acer for prices under 800 ( even saw one for 500ch), does anyone know of a good one ( in that range of prices), we need some advice !!

Thanks !!

Well my netbook is priced around 800chf. It's an ASUS N10J. It can do most things except very graphic-heavy gaming.

Problem might be that the screen is quite small (10.2"), but then again its very portable and light!

The one I'm using to type this has been pretty good for me, if it's any help.
It's an Acer Aspire One D150 - There's a few different specs available, but mine is:
Intel Atom N280 Processor
1Gb RAM
160Gb HDD
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
Builtin 3G MODEM
10 inch Screen
Builtin Webcam

And it's blue too!

It cost 799CHF, and I use it with a mobile broadband subscription from Orange. So I can browse the net anywhere, which is really handy for checking EF of course.

As for performance, it's really good - not super fast, but I installed Windows 7 and Office 2007 on mine (instead of Windows XP that it came with), and it runs just fine. I always have it connected to either Wi-Fi or 3G when it's on, and I get about 5-6 hours battery life. Which translates for me to about 2-3 days between charges.

Mine came from Interdiscount in Marktplatz Basel, and they had cheaper versions without the 3G, but also with smaller batteries.

I have a wonderful practically new HP laptop that I bought in Houston in November well below CHF 800 to substitute my broken one. Luckily I managed to successfully repair my old laptop and therefore I am selling the HP. Here are the technical details:



HP - G4-1215DX, AMD Dual-Core A4-3300M,14" Display, 4GB RAM, 320GB DRIVE, WEBCAM



Overall condition is excellent. Used it 2-3 times only. Office and Kaspersky antivirus installed at the shop. Price is USD 499.

And buying and importing from Ebay? or there is some kind of eBay there in Switzerland?

Erm, hate to disappoint you, but this thread is 2.5 years old.

There's ebay.ch and ricardo.ch

Look how the specs have changed since then though. This is not far off the CHF 800 of then, pretty close actually. It was about 2009 that the first MacPro laptops were coming out with flash memory as an option to spinning HDs, that would take you into the CHF 1000s though.

Funnily enough, I was looking at the specs of the PCs referred to earlier in the thread and thinking "That's a 400.- machine at most".

Then I saw the posting date

Spending chf 800 on your nieces birthday is so 2009 anyhow.

Austerity is 2012's watchword... lets keep these sort of presents to a maximum of around chf 600.

I guess the OP was asking for a notebook...