Hamburg - Laptop buyers should pay special attention to the amount of RAM installed in the computer. Two gigabytes (GB) is the rock-bottom threshold, recommends Hamburg-based Computerbild magazine, as that is enough to work with Windows Vista.

Those who must satisfy "memory hungry" applications like photo editors are best advised to go for a model with 3 GB of RAM. The magazine tested eight current laptops costing around 500 dollars each.

The portable computers were powerful enough to handle office applications. Once the tasks moved into photo and video editing tasks, however, the desktop PCs in the same price class are often faster.

The tested laptops were also not powerful enough to run graphics-intensive games, largely because they did not have sufficiently hearty graphics processors. dpa