I purchased a set of Sony srs a201 pc speakers from an ebay shop for £18.99. I bought them because I was frustrated with the extremely low output and low quality of the built in speakers in my Samsung laptop.
They are smart looking and have extremely small footprint so they don`t take up loads of room on your desk. They are simplicity itself to use, just plug them into the headphone jack of your laptop and off you go. The speakers are fitted with 2 metres of cable which should be more than enough for most uses. I bought them over the internet without having a chance to hear them and so put my faith in the Sony brand name to provide me a good quality product.
They are certainly an improvement in sound quality and volume over the internal speakers of my laptop but beyond that I was quite disappointed that they were not as loud as I had hoped. Playing games or rock music at a relatively high volume the speakers seemed to lack bass and the sound would distort the louder i wanted to go.
I suppose my expectations were too high as they are about the cheapest pc speakers you can buy from a good brand name and you can spend several times this amount for higher quality speakers. Another minor observation is that they are so small and light that they are easily knocked off the desk when I snag the cable. I ended up blu-tacking mine down to prevent this!