While a wide variety of laptops under different brands are available in the market, it becomes challenging to know which laptop brand model would meet your requirement. But prior to that, here are some of the features you should know in order to make a right decision.
While buying a Laptop – CPU, storage size, RAM, battery life, USB ports are some of the features that would help you in making a right decision.
Here are some tips on buying a laptop:
CPU: The processor has a huge influence on performance, but depending on what you want to do.
Intel Core i3: Low-Performance processor so is the price low. Less preferred.
Intel Core i5: Laptops with Intel Core i5 CPU is capable of handling daily tasks. The best combination of price and performance. Some that have a dedicated graphics chip can perform much better in gaming.
Intel Core i7: 7th Generation Core Series they are part of Intel’s latest and offer better performance. High-end performance for gaming.
AMD A, FX or E Series: The company calls them APUs rather than CPUs found on low-cost laptops. AMD processors provide decent performance for the money that’s good enough for web surfing & media viewing.
Intel Pentium / Celeron: These chips are a little faster, but offer worse battery life. If you can pay more to get a Core i3 or i5, you’d be better off.
RAM: The most common RAM size you can find in laptop PCs nowadays is 4GB. Larger size RAM’s helps in multi-tasking in a laptop or capability to run more programs simultaneously without slowing down overall computing speed or crashing the operating system. 8GB is slowly becoming the new standard for the mainstream laptops, together with 12GB and 16GB. Gaming laptops come with 24GB or even 32 GB.
Storage Drive (Hard Drive): Buy laptops with SSD – solid-state storage drives rather than hard drive. The performance of laptop depends on the storage drive. Even more important than the speed of your CPU is the performance of your storage drive because you’ll see at least three times the speed and a much faster laptop overall.
Screen Size: Laptop marketed as an Ultrabook are designed to be slim and light if portability is the main concern, A Laptop with the small screen and lightweight can be considered. More to the point, though, look for a laptop with a screen that’s 12.5-13.3 inches in size, and a weight that is from 1-1.5 kg.
Making presentations become easy with laptops where you can flip and detach screen.
Screen quality: Working for long hours on a laptop may affect your vision, so get a screen that is comfortable to look at. Many laptops these days also have touchscreens with glossy screens lead to reflections, so consider a laptop that doesn’t have a touchscreen.
Battery Life: 8+ hours of battery life is considered ideal but if a laptop works for 6 hours that’s good enough. The battery life depends on what you do, don’t go by vendor’s commitment and as specified by the company. The factors that affect battery life are the screen brightness, the screen resolution, and the tasks that you run. If you run programs that need lots of processing, or if you stream lots of online videos, or if you transfer lots of files over your wireless network, then your battery will drain a lot sooner than what the vendor has quoted.
USB ports: Look for a laptop that has a couple of USB ports for plugging in external devices like a hard drive to back up your laptop’s data and other such devices.
It is better to buy laptops bundled with the operating system as they are a lot cheaper than buying a standalone operating system later.
You got my attention when you said that a larger RAM size helps to make sure that you can do multitasking and run more programs without slowing down. My husband and I are planning to buy a used laptop for our daughter as our birthday gift to her. She would also need one for her school works and projects. Since we want to make sure that her apps will not crash in any way while studying, we will consider all your tips.