The stock market's a mess, your company's balance sheet looks like a sea of red ink and your budget for outfitting 50 employees with new notebooks has been slashed to the bone. What's a poor buyer to do?

You could try those new under-US$400 ultrasmall notebooks, but that's not really the answer. In most cases, bargain-basement notebooks are meant to be adjuncts to another computer and don't offer enough speed, storage or substance to make it in the rough-and-tumble world of business.

The simple truth of the matter is that the notebooks that businesspeople carry with them need to be a cut above the rest. They need to be comfortable enough to use in a variety of places, have the power to churn through corporate databases, be effective Web surfboards and -- above all else -- be reliable and ready for work every day.

But while you may not be able to find a full-power notebook for US$400, you can get a solid working system at a relatively low price. To test this idea, I put together a group of three business notebooks that cost US$850 or less.

The systems were the US$782 Dell Vostro 1510, the US$800 Toshiba Satellite Pro L300D EZ-1003X and the US$829 HP Compaq 6735b. All had 15.4-in. screens, midrange Intel or AMD processors and wireless networking capability. They all weighed between 5 lbs. and 6 lbs. and offered a reasonable amount of memory and hard drive space.

What was left out? Some cut corners on graphics, and some weren't yet up to the latest 802.11n standard in Wi-Fi networking. None had Bluetooth, and only the Compaq 6735b came with a fingerprint scanner, which some businesses prefer as security tools. Each came with a one-year warranty -- with these lower-cost notebooks, the gold-standard three-year warranty is not standard.

To separate the wheat from the chaff, I next did what millions of employees do every day. With notebook in hand, I downloaded e-mail, did research on the Web and wrote and ran the numbers with spreadsheets. I even watched a few YouTube videos and listened to some Internet radio.

In this time of tight cash, one of these contenders could be your next, best business notebook. Let the battle begin, and may the best notebook win.