Buying a new Laptop can sometimes be a very confusing task. Given the fact that in today’s market there are so many brands and each of them offering so many features and configurations, getting the right laptop could be evenly daunting for all. Here are some tips that can help you drill down to a decision and aid you in choosing the best laptop that fits your needs
There are a range of laptops featured to fit different requirements the users have. There are executive laptops that do the job of daily office use, then there are entertainment laptops, exclusive gaming laptops and some made for basic web surfing, MS office and Facebook. So first decide on which one actually fits you. Now you also have laptops dedicated for the Female group which are more colorful and some for young people which offer gaming and entertainment features also there are pale black ones for business users.
Entertainment Laptop: This category of laptops holds the most high-end processor capabilities backed with some features like High Definition, Larger screens, Blue-ray disks, built-in woofers and surround speakers, extended battery life etc., If you are a person who loves watching movies on the laptop or into DJ, music, video editing etc., you may choose this category of laptops
Business Laptops: Here are the most powerful and reliable laptops in the entire category. They also have better warranty compared to the others as PC makers eye for corporate deals on these models and establish a long term Annual Maintenance relationships which are also available for individual users. They can run Auto-Cad like applications, SAP, SQL Server, Office Tools in a much sophisticated way with fewer burdens on the processor and RAM.
Gaming Laptops: The most sold segment in the Laptop market are the Gaming Laptops. Many games need a lot of resources to run and these machines offer the same. Features combination of entertainment and technology built into one and offers many extended fancies like external designs, better storage, battery life , high-end Graphic cards etc., If you are into gaming, choose this category of laptops.Which Brand to go for?
I have a list of brands which by experience are my favourite
1. Dell (Best support)
2. Acer (Best Quality)
3. HP (Saturated Market)
4. Lenovo and Sony (costly)
5. Toshiba (Support problems)
6. Asus (Less known)
7. HCL, Wipro, LG, Samsung (small market)
Now comes the question of Which brand to choose what configurations I should eye, what are the accessories to be looked for and what are the customizable options.
Most of the laptops are Intel Processor based laptops. Let’s look at Intel’s offerings,
Intel comes with 1st and 2nd Generation Processors. Processors also called as chipset by some manufacturers as they hold the entire BIOS (Basic Input Output System) Program.
How much Processor will I need?
The following are the top few which you should look at
1st Gen Intel Core i3 – For Business Laptops and Basic browsing experience
2nd Gen Intel Core i3 – Entertainment Laptops
2nd Gen Intel Core i5 – Entertainment and Gaming
2nd Gen Intel Core i7 – Mostly preferred for Gaming
Intel comes with 1st and 2nd Generation Processors. Processors also called as chipset by some manufacturers as they hold the entire BIOS (Basic Input Output System) Program.
How much Processor will I need?
The following are the top few which you should look at
1st Gen Intel Core i3 – For Business Laptops and Basic browsing experience
2nd Gen Intel Core i3 – Entertainment Laptops
2nd Gen Intel Core i5 – Entertainment and Gaming
2nd Gen Intel Core i7 – Mostly preferred for Gaming
What should be the RAM?
More RAM means more ease of processing. More RAM does not mean faster processing, because the processing capability is solely dependent on the processor.
Following are currently in the market
2 GB – Basic Requirement to run OS like windows 7, 8 smoothly and effeciently
3 GB – Good enough and preferred RAM requirement
4 GB – Can run many graphic apps
6 GB – Entertainment and Gaming
8 GB – Gaming Requirement
12 GB – Enhanced Gaming
How much should be the Hard drive ?
320 GB – Must have minimum space to enjoy trouble-free storage and avoid drive getting frequently full
320 GB – Must have minimum space to enjoy trouble-free storage and avoid drive getting frequently full
500 GB – the more the merrier
640 GB – Recommended space is to have 640GB and can store a lot. Usually available in Entertainment laptops
750 GB – Love to have this much of storage space
1 TB & up – Go for it if you can afford it. Make sure you have atleast 3 partitions for better archiving and organizing
Solid State Drive – These are the new type of hard drives which never go bad unlike the regular issues we face on magnetic-spindle based hard drives. They are fixed bigger memory card like drives and usually they perform better than the regular hard drives. They are also called as SSD.
Graphics Card
Also called Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). Two types are in play here. One is a Dedicated Graphics card and secondly it’s an integrated card.
Integrated cards are for regular usage. They do not offer or support high end graphic requirements. On many cases Integrated Graphics share their memory with the System RAM. AMD chipsets come with HD enabled GPUs. Nvidia Graphics and ATI Radeon are the leading brands, watchout for the higher series of these cards. Higher than the 300 series.
Screen Resolution
This is an important aspect and its upto you to choose. Usually these are 15.4”, 17.3” or 19” and are physical diagonal dimensions. You get LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and LED (Light Emitting Diode) and also new in the market is the 3D display. LCD has a life of certain hours less than LED. LCDs consume more power than the LEDs thereby reducing your battery backup time. HD is not an aspect of the LCD or LED but its more to do with the graphic chipset.
Graphics Card
Also called Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). Two types are in play here. One is a Dedicated Graphics card and secondly it’s an integrated card.
Integrated cards are for regular usage. They do not offer or support high end graphic requirements. On many cases Integrated Graphics share their memory with the System RAM. AMD chipsets come with HD enabled GPUs. Nvidia Graphics and ATI Radeon are the leading brands, watchout for the higher series of these cards. Higher than the 300 series.
Screen Resolution
This is an important aspect and its upto you to choose. Usually these are 15.4”, 17.3” or 19” and are physical diagonal dimensions. You get LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) and LED (Light Emitting Diode) and also new in the market is the 3D display. LCD has a life of certain hours less than LED. LCDs consume more power than the LEDs thereby reducing your battery backup time. HD is not an aspect of the LCD or LED but its more to do with the graphic chipset.
Battery
Batteries are often 6cell or a 9 cell or 12 cell batteries and because they are consumables they only have 1 year warranty irrespective of your laptop warranty. 12 Cell is recommended if you travel a lot. Else settle for the 9 cell batteries as its proven that batteries won’t last very long and at some point you will have to replace it.
Operating System
You may choose Window 7 or 8 (If already available). Never go for a pirated version which your friend offers to install. It may dampen your overall PC working experience as the windows updates won’t take place on time due to piracy. Ask for the original version.
Free operating systems like Red Had Linux, Suse, Ubuntu etc., can come in handy if you love doing VI scripts or programming.
Batteries are often 6cell or a 9 cell or 12 cell batteries and because they are consumables they only have 1 year warranty irrespective of your laptop warranty. 12 Cell is recommended if you travel a lot. Else settle for the 9 cell batteries as its proven that batteries won’t last very long and at some point you will have to replace it.
Operating System
You may choose Window 7 or 8 (If already available). Never go for a pirated version which your friend offers to install. It may dampen your overall PC working experience as the windows updates won’t take place on time due to piracy. Ask for the original version.
Free operating systems like Red Had Linux, Suse, Ubuntu etc., can come in handy if you love doing VI scripts or programming.
Accessories
Memory Stick/card: You need to have a Memory stick of atleast 16 GB. Many laptops offer this for free. To transfer photos, small data, songs etc.,
Head Phone: To enjoy personalized music
External Hard drive: To store portable and private data
Travel or Auto Charger: For Car and travel purposes
Laptop Bag/Backpack: This should be given by the vendor for free else don’t buy that Laptop
Antivirus Software: This is a must for all Windows based laptops.
Warranty
Warranty
Dell offers complete care warranty which means that even if you accidentally drop the laptop or any damage they will replace it with a brand new one with similar configuration. Nobody offers this warranty in the market currently. Purchase a 1 year extended warranty or 2 years because that’s when you will need more support.
If you choose to pay a bit more go for Apple Laptops. They are quite fascinating but you will have to forego some of your favorite windows applications
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