Laptop and Notebooks

What to look for when buying a Laptop/Notebook

So you're looking at buying a new laptop. Laptops, also called Notebooks represent a serious alternative to their desktop counterparts. Laptops offer portability and with the advances of wireless laptops you can be online where ever you and your laptop go. Laptops can now do all if not more than traditional desktop machines.

A new laptop, depending on the specs will cost from around $600 to $5000 dollars, with the average brand new laptop under $2000. When deciding what to purchase it's a good idea to identify it's main use, i.e. home use, corporate business, small business or net book. Some of the most common brands for Laptops/Notebooks are Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer, ASUS and Lenovo.

When comparing the specs of different laptops/notebooks there are a few key features to consider and compare. These are the installed RAM, processor speed and type, hard drive capacity, optical drive, screen size, networking and operating system.

When it comes to Laptops the more RAM the better performance you will have, however this also comes with an increase in cost. On laptops RAM usually ranges from 512mb (half a GB) to 8GB. The most common specs these days are 2GB and under.

Processor speed is another important factor to consider. Processor speed is measured by GHz and can range from around 1.2GHz to 2.5GHz and above. The processor speed would depend on the purpose of the laptop. The average specs to look for would be around 2GHz. However simply comparing processor speed is not an accurate comparison of actual performance. Another important factor is the processor type. The 2 main players in the processor/CPU market are Intel and AMD. Intel has the following processor types; Core 2 Duo, Pentium Dual-Core, Celeron M, Celeron Dual-Core and Celeron. AMD has the Turion, Turion 64, Athlon 64 and Athlon X2 Dual-Core.

Hard drive capacity can range anywhere from 10GB to 300GB. The more hard drive capacity the more room you will have to store your files. The average hard drive capacity would be 100GB.

The optical drive type is another feature to consider. Types include blu-ray, blu-ray dual layer burner, cd burner, cd-rom, dvd burner, dvd-dual layer burner and dvd-rom. An average optical drive would be a dvd burner.

Laptop screen size depends on the intended purpose of the laptop. The liquid crystal display (LCD) screens used in laptops come in a range of sizes from 8 inch to 17 inch (measured diagonally). Smaller screens mean lighter and more portable laptops. Common screen size is 15 inch.

Other considerations are networking types such as integrated wireless LAN, Bluetooth, network card and infrared port. And the operating system such as Microsoft Windows Vista, XP or Linux.