The Gazette (Montreal) — If you don't want to be weighed down while out and about this summer, Vision Quest (visionquestce.com) will be introducing a teeny micro notebook in June at Zellers locations for just $299.99.

Called the V-Book, this compact 20-centimetre (eight-inch) laptop weighs about a kilogram (less than 2.5 pounds), offers 4.5 hours of battery life and includes built-in Wi-Fi support (802.11g), a PC card (for WAN cards, to access the Net via your cellphone) and two USB ports.

Be forewarned, however, this entry-level price means the laptop has only 2GB of Flash memory instead of a 120GB hard drive, but you can add more with inexpensive SecureDigital (SD) cards. It ships with the Linux operating system, but Windows XP can be installed if you know how to copy it to a USB thumb drive or SD card; the V-Book doesn't offer an optical drive.

Because you're sacrificing power and features for size and price, the V-Book is more ideal for basic surfing, email and word processing rather than memory-intensive applications like PC gaming and video editing.