Perhaps if you are doing nothing more than lounging poolside while working at a part-time job this summer, the season may seem to be progressing slowly. To a workaday stiff like myself with precious few summertime weekends and a boatload of back-to-school laptops to review, I see the calendar soon turning to August and Labor Day fast approaching. As I view it, there's little time left before a busy class schedule will replace your lazy days of summer.

To help you find the right laptop before that happens, we here at CNET Reviews have queued up 27 laptops that you'll likely find on big-box store shelves this month and next. We've broken the laptops into four groups, based on price, and have completed our reviews of the systems in the first two groups: Entry-level and Budget.

(Look for the Mainstream $800-$1000 group to be completed by the end of next week, with the High-end group to follow in August; we're still waiting on some Centrino 2 laptops to arrive at CNET Labs.)

After the break, see our recommendations for the Entry-Level and Budget categories.

2GB too many

(Credit: Gateway)

Last month's desktop announcement from Gateway showed us two things: one, that desktop memory is now more affordable than ever; and two, that the 64-bit software era is upon us in full force.

Each of the four desktops Gateway announced that day comes with 64-bit Vista, and they also all have either 4GB or 6GB of RAM. Considering the decidedly mainstream $550 to $1,150 price range for those PCs, all of a sudden those exotic features don't seem so exotic any more. But then we got our hands on one of those new Gateways for a review. What we found surprised us.

The world's largest PC maker has decided it doesn't need a separate gaming PC unit anymore. From now on, Voodoo will be just one of Hewlett-Packard's consumer PC brands.

The recently introduced Voodoo Envy gaming laptop.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Voodoo founder Rahul Sood said on his personal blog ...

Is four processing cores inside a laptop overkill? Probably not for gamers. Intel is expected to meet this insatiable need for speed when it rolls out it first mobile quad-core processor.

An Intel executive is on the record stating an August roll-out.

And this may happen sooner in August than

If you're going to be serious about electronics retail in the U.S., it looks like you have to be serious about employing professional geeks.

Beginning Saturday, 20 Sam's Club stores in Virginia and Maryland will offer tech support from PC repair services company Geeks on Call as ...

Perhaps the better question is, "Who isn't getting into mini-notebooks these days?"

The latest rumor floating around is that Korean electronics giant LG has asked MSI to build for it a tiny notebook based on Intel's Netbook reference design containing an Atom processor.

This one was started by ...

(Credit: Asus)

Asus--the PC maker that in the space of seven months brought you the Eee PC 701, Eee PC 900, Eee PC 901, Eee PC 904HD, Eee PC 1000, and Eee PC 1000H--has another trick up its sleeve.

If you love the size and ample screen of the Eee ...

Update:

You may have seen an article in The New York Times this weekend (registration required) on the subject of a new trend in small, cheap laptops and desktops. The story deals with the pressure PC makers face to make low-end, low-margin computers after the success of the Asus Eee PC ...

This week was all about the deuce: after a short delay, Intel introduced its Centrino 2 platform late Monday evening. Laptop manufacturers were quick to adopt the new platform, and many took the opportunity to significantly revamp their laptop lines. Piggybacking on the Centrino 2 announcement were IdeaPads and ThinkPads ...