Buying a Laptop Computer

There are a few important things to consider when buying a laptop (or notebook) computer. All of which have to do with what usage your machine will have. You can get the best machine in the world but is it the best one for you? That is the question with laptops more than with regular desktop computers.

1. Size
Laptops range in sizes from generally 7″ to 17″ screens. This of course is all about portability. Do you like laptops mainly because they’re not big and ugly on your desk, or do you want one that you will always carry with you? In the first case there is really no need to cut down on size. As long as you don’t have to move it, a bigger screen is always better, and a bigger keyboard that goes along with it is always preferable as well. If you only drag it around the house to the sofa or to a friends place you will soon notice though the significant lightness of a 15″ to a bigger model, and that may be the way to go.

2. Memory
Especially if you’re one that keep your computer running for long periods of time and don’t like to close programs and browser tabs, you should really look at this. Memory is a relatively cheap computer component, and in 2011 there is really no excuse to go below 4GB memory. Actually, for that very reason 6, 8 or more is what should be looked at, since having too little memory will kill your computer’s performance like nothing else.

3. Graphic Card
Traditionally many laptops did not have dedicated memory and boards to handle graphics, but as time has passed and the usage of laptops have grown into general purpose computers, pretty much all except low-end models feature this. The relevant question here is basically whether or not you like to play modern 3d games or not. If you don’t, there’s not much need to pay extra for models with high-end graphics cards.

4. Noise
This is a factor that is all too often overlooked. Not least often when buying high performance laptops, you will find that it comes at the price of loads of noise. These models are mainly designed to cool all high performance parts, and to do that extra fans are installed, often running at excessive speeds which can be quite irritating.

5. Sound
While laptop speakers rarely deliver good sound by regular standards, there can be reason to test what sound can acutally be delivered in terms of volume. Some laptops actually tend to suffer from the low-volume disease, meaning that you often can find yourself forced to use head-phones to get enough volume to even make out the words when watching a movie.

6. Wireless Network Speed
This really isn’t much of an issue anymore, but it is still something to double check before buying. Just a few years ago, wireless networks were a reliable bottleneck in terms of speed. But with the invention of a standard called 802.11n (commonly just known as the n-standard), wireless connections can now theoretically reach up to 300Mbit/s. Take caution though of the 5% of all new laptops that still do not support the n-standard. Stay away from those if you don’t want an unnecessary limit to your internet connection speed.

How about the rest? Of course there are many more factors to consider when buying a new laptop. The one’s I’ve mentioned here are factors that are easily overlooked when a salesperson starts to go on about numbers this and that.

As with many other things, you tend to get what you pay for. No new laptop sold today is too slow for basic web browsing and word processing, and from that it’s up to you how much speed you want to pay for. Also it can be somewhat confusing for the not-so-computer-savvy person to really get into which processors are faster and so on. Higher numbers (like Intel i7 compared to Intel i5) doesn’t tell the whole story about which is necessarily faster. There are lots of sub-models for instance of the i5 and i7, but again, as a rule, you get what you pay for, so that doesn’t need to be your biggest concern.

Another topic is what you can plug in to your laptop. For regular users this doesn’t tend to be an issue though. All new laptops have a handful of USB ports. A HDMI slot is also needed if you want to connect it to your TV, but pretty much every computer has one of those.

Well, this was a few pointers that should get you started I think.

Happy hunting!