Ready, click, eat!

When the tech-savvy Emerson College students who live on Brainerd Road in Allston are too hungry, impatient, or just plain lazy to stroll the few blocks that separate them from dozens of restaurants, they get delivery. But even though any number of websites promise that many eateries are only a mouse click away, and the house is full of wireless laptops, the students usually take a decidedly low-tech approach.

They call for pizza.

''We order a lot of Domino's in this house," says Lauren MacLeod. ''Almost every day."

The entrepreneurs behind such websites as DiningIn, Campusfood, and the newer EatNow and Nightowl Deliveries might find such an admission disappointing, given that each business counts the college crowd as at least part of its target customer base. When the Globe asked the students to put those four services through their paces, though, the group was more than happy to oblige. (They're on a budget, after all, and we were buying.)

On a recent Wednesday night, the nine students -- five who live in the house, and four friends -- divided into four groups of two or three, hauled out their iBooks, and logged on. Under movie posters of ''Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," ''Dirty Pretty Things," and ''Million Dollar Baby" (one roommate works at Best Buy), they poked around the websites and looked for restaurants that called out to them. ''Wing It!" Bryan Winter cried while looking at EatNow. ''Wing It's so good!"

''Wing It's like 10 feet down the road," replied Jim Shumway. ''Why would we order from there?"

Shumway, in turn, was tempted by Beantown Dogs on the Campusfood site. ''They have something called a taco dog," he said to MacLeod.

''That sounds gross," she said.

''Here's a BLT dog -- now that's gross," he replied. They ended up picking Lucky Wah, a nearby Chinese place.

Ben Cohen looked up Zaftigs, a Coolidge Corner deli, on the DiningIn site. ''They have the best restaurants and the longest delivery times," he said of DiningIn. ''For a place that's around the corner, it says it takes an hour to get here."

Erin Neuhardt, the only one who doesn't go to Emerson (she's at Endicott College) went on the EatNow site with Ryan McGettigan, who was in the mood for Malaysian food from Aneka Rasa. Neuhardt wasn't, and they settled on Bluestone Bistro instead.

Winter and Gray Bouchard gravitated toward Kashmir Indian restaurant on the Nightowl site and quickly started picking out dishes. ''Let's go with the tandoori tikka," Bouchard said.

''Rock 'n' roll," Winter replied as he scrolled and clicked.

Once they all made their picks, they went through the registration and ordering processes, with mostly good things to say about the sites' navigability. (The exception was Nightowl, whose site asked Winter for a delivery address each time he added a menu item.)

Each group waited until the clock struck 8 p.m. before hitting the order button. And then we waited to see which delivery would come first: the ones from Zaftigs or Lucky Wah, both less than a mile away in Brookline; Bluestone Bistro, a little farther, on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton; or Kashmir, the farthest, on Newbury Street in the Back Bay.

On that score, Nightowl won with its delivery from Kashmir at 8:40. The chow from Bluestone Bistro and Lucky Wah ordered through Eatnow and Campusfood followed within several minutes, and DiningIn pulled up the rear, bringing the food from Zaftigs at 8:52. All four services, however, were well within their predicted arrival time.

The food, too, was in better shape than expected, for the most part arriving fresh and hot. Or, in one case, fresh and cold. Mango and passion fruit smoothies that Shumway and MacLeod ordered from Lucky Wah were positively icy. The exception was in the Zaftigs package; the veggie burger, chicken sandwich, latkes, onion rings, and matzo-ball soup were in fine shape, but the French fries were cold and under-the-heat-lamp-too-long stale.

Cohen, Hillary Gurtler, and Alia Hamada had to hand it to DiningIn, though: There were enough paper plates and forks to help feed an army. Neuhardt was impressed that EatNow let her choose the type of pasta and type of sauce, and that her special request for spinach in the dish went off without a hitch. As Shumway and MacLeod shared Lucky Wah's ''strange-flavored chicken," it was a good thing that those smoothies were so cold.

''Apparently 'strange' means spicy as hell," Shumway said.

''I can't feel my tongue," MacLeod replied.

As for the Kashmir food, Bouchard and Winter were in heaven. ''It's hot and tasty like I just ordered it," Winter said as he munched on a vegetable samosa. ''This is so good."

While they ate, some turned on ''Beauty and the Geek" to look for a friend of McGettigan's -- a beauty, not a geek. Some made cellphone calls about plans for pool later in the night, and others disappeared into a bedroom to play Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition.

And they mulled the question of whether they would do this again. They were pleasantly surprised by the efficiency and ease of the services, but they staunchly resisted the idea of paying any delivery charges, especially when so many good restaurants beckon just down the street.

''It's a budget thing," said Winter. ''This was delicious, and I have nothing but good things to say about the food, but I don't have any money. I live paycheck to paycheck."

Of the four services used, only Nightowl was free delivery, and that was only because the charge is waived for first-time users. Like DiningIn, Nightowl uses its own drivers, which allows it to work with restaurants that don't deliver. Nightowl, which charges $2-$4, also will make multiple stops for an extra $1 each, will pursue a custom order with any restaurant in the city, even those not listed on its website, and will even deliver ''convenience items" such as toilet paper and milk, in addition to other custom services. Besides their delivery fees -- DiningIn charges $4.99-$5.99 -- the two services make money by marking up the food and taking a commission.

Campusfood and EatNow, which more specifically target students, leave it to the restaurants to deliver their own food, serving instead as the connection between customer and restaurant. That limits their service to restaurants that have drivers, but it keeps their costs low. They also let the restaurants set their own delivery fees, which range from free to $2 per order. (If Shumway and MacLeod had gone with Beantown Dogs, for instance, delivery would have been gratis.) The services don't mark up the food, but they do take a percentage commission from the restaurants.

DiningIn, which Michael Hackel founded in 1987 when he got bad takeout service from the now-defunct Division 16, certainly serves some students but targets a more affluent clientele. ''We go for restaurants with great brand recognition," Hackel says, noting that no other service offers delivery from the acclaimed Oishii in Chestnut Hill. DiningIn delivers a total of 100,000 meals a month in four cities and plans to add three cities this year and four to six next year.

Even though Nightowl was launched about a year ago by Northeastern University students, it is trying to broaden beyond a student focus by building its corporate catering business and working to sign up South End and Back Bay restaurants. ''They're places that young professionals and working people would order from," says co-owner Nathaniel Milner, who founded the company with Felix Bendersky and Jeremy Koulish, adding that the company hopes to expand to Miami.

Owners of Campusfood and the brand-new EatNow, both born in Philadelphia, are sticking with the student focus and touting their ability to offer specials not available to people who order by phone. Campusfood, which Michael Saunders started at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 when he couldn't get his favorite restaurant to answer the phone for a tuna hoagie order, now serves 300 colleges and universities nationwide and is rolling out such services as virtual gift cards.

EatNow is in six East Coast cities, and CEO Nat Turner, a student at the Wharton School at Penn, says he hopes to expand soon to three more. Turner says he and his sales team try to negotiate the best deals for students, including urging restaurants to keep delivery fees low -- if not nonexistent. ''A lot of places in college areas don't charge," he says, ''because they know that obviously deters students."

From the sound of things on Brainerd Road, it sure does. For this group of students, anything that causes them to part with an extra buck is suspect. ''Maybe in the really cold weather I could see it, if you really didn't want to leave the house," said Gurtler. ''But there are so many restaurants around here that are really cheap."

Hamada has an even more radical money-saving strategy. She cooks.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.