How to Pick the Best Notebook for Your Needs
The decision to buy this laptop can be tough, with hundreds of laptops and high-end laptops priced from $200 to $2000. In addition to budgeting, the work and games you do on your laptop should help narrow your options. Here are some tips for smart laptop purchases.
How to Select the Best Notebook for Your Needs
1. Consider your operating system. You have more choices with Windows laptops, but Apple‘s MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops can also run Windows, which makes these laptops attractive for their versatility.
However, Apple’s laptops are much pricier. If you’re considering this age-old debate between Mac or PC laptop, think about how much you really want to spend (see below) and whether you need a laptop with features (Blu-Ray, touchscreen, TV tuners, etc.) not available on the few variants Apple offers.
2. Start with your budget.
- Netbooks are the cheapest and smallest type of laptop, and you can actually use them for business, but they’re very underpowered and limited. They are also being replaced by tablets and more powerful laptops shrinking in size and weight.
- You can buy a budget laptop, good for most basic tasks like web browsing and word processing, for under $500 (even much less during sale holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday); these laptops sometimes use older processors and often come in the 15.6″ display size. Generally, the smaller and thinner you want your laptop to be, the more you’ll have to pay for it.
- If you have a couple of hundred more to spend (between $600 and $1000), you can buy a thin-and-light laptop (4 to 6 pounds and 14-inch to 16-inch displays), with better performance: the latest generation processors, a sizable hard drive of 500 GB or more, and more memory. Thin-and-lights are probably the most common types of laptops being sold (and bought) today.
- For $1,000 or more, you can opt for either a sleek ultraportable laptop–light in weight, and very thin, with screen sizes 13 inches or less–or go the other way, and buy a gaming laptop or a desktop replacement laptop–heavy in weight and with giant 17-inch screens.
3. Make a checklist of what’s most important to you in your next laptop. Think about how you want to use your laptop to rank the features you should look for in your next laptop:
- Entertainment, such as music and movies? Go for the larger screen sizes, 15-inch or more, and higher resolution, high definition displays (1920×1800 pixels). You’d probably also want as large a hard drive as possible for all your media storage, e.g., hard drives of 750GB or more. A Blu-Ray player would probably be on your list for movie-watching, as well as HDMI ports and/or wireless TV streaming.
- Travel or a lot of mobile work? Portability will obviously be your biggest consideration. Look for screen sizes 13-inch or under, weights 4 pounds or under, and a rated Acer as10d31 laptop battery life of 6 hours or more. You might also want a mobile broadband card in your laptop for Internet access on the go.
- A lot of graphic/multimedia work or gaming? A large, high-definition screen, lots of memory (4GB is low, 8 GB is better), and a dedicated video graphics card should be at the top of your checklist. For the best performance, look for quad-core processors.
- For a balance of performance and portability, seek out a thin-and-light or ultraportable laptop with 13- or 14-inch display, the mid-range processor (e.g., Intel Core i5 processor), 4GB or more of RAM, and 500GB or more of hard drive space (or, for better performance, a solid state drive).
4. Read reviews. Once you have your checklist, it’s time to find the laptops that fit the bill. Check out review roundup sites like ConsumerSearch to see the most recommended laptops, then compare features to your checklist. Keep in mind that a lot of laptop manufacturers, such as Dell and HP, also let you configure laptops to your specifications–adjusting the amount of RAM or choosing a different hard drive, for example.
5. Compare laptops. Finally, I like to make a table comparing the top few options. You could use a spreadsheet and list the specs (processor, memory, hard drive, graphics card, etc.) as well as price for each laptop to make your final choice. This interactive laptop chart can also help you narrow down the options, by filtering available laptops by their specs.
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