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How to choose a laptop?

How do I choose best laptop?

  • Laptop shopping has always been a very tedious job. The sheer number of options available in the market coupled with the long list of laptop specifications makes it a tough job for a user to find the most suitable one. The advancing technology has led to newer innovations which has caused an uproar among users when they are trying to buy laptop online.

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    Step 1: Choose Your Screen Size and Resolution Laptops screen sizes generally fall into two main sizes: 15.6″ approximately or 17” and will use either LCDs, that use active matrix technology, or LEDs, that are brighter and have better contrast. The larger screen will be more comfortable for daily use, but will make your laptop heavier and may drain the battery faster. Smaller, lighter laptops are great for frequent travel, or as a companion to your desktop model. Weight will be crucial if you are toting your laptop around campus or through airports every day. Look for a high resolution screen if budget permits. Step 2: Processors With advances in processor power and power consumption, laptop processors are sometimes the same as their desktop cousins. It is not uncommon to find a quad-core laptops now-a-days. Mobile versions of some processors are still available on budget laptops and are cut-down versions of their desktop versions. These cut-down versions feature better battery life but it comes at the expense of some speed. Always choose the latest generation Step 6: Graphics The first feature a gamer inspects when choosing a laptop is the graphics card or cards. Any gaming laptop worth its weight will feature one or two cards from ATI or Nvidia. A graphics card is a crucial component of a gaming computer. A graphics card is essentially composed of a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) and memory.Choose at least 2GB of memory. Step 3: Battery This feature is often overlooked. Look for a machine with a longer battery time. It’s not worth buying a budget laptop if you have to plug it in every hour! Also, if you intend to be on the road or away from wall power, consider buying a second battery as backup. Step 4: Wireless Most of today’s laptops come with wireless capability built into them. The more budget laptops will have wireless b/g/n built in. This will be fine for reading email at home or at your local coffee shop. Step 5: Memory Random Access Memory (RAM) is the working memory in your laptop. Just like a desktop, RAM is second biggest factor in system speed. As your computer operates, it uses RAM to process programs and information. If you start to fill up available memory the computer will automatically move the less used parts of memory to your hard drive. Step 7: Hard Drives The hard drive provides the permanent storage space for your laptop’s programs and frequently-used data. Most hard drives today are rated in gigabytes (GB). Programs, images, music files, and data take up a lot of space on your hard drive, so make sure you start with plenty of room. Buy a SSD if you can it does make a difference.

Dev Vaidya at Quora Visit the source

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The most important thing is you have to detrmine for what you ll be using ur lap for... If you are a movie buff look for the display....go for highesy resolution and see the technology being used...IPS panels offers excellent quality these days... For developers look for professors and ram...check i series's generation, 4 th generation being the latest... Simply put i3 two cores, i5 two or four cores with turbo boost of proccessor speed,i7 four or more cores with turbo boost and hyperthreading which offers max performance in less power so battery ll lasts longer. For image processing like Photoshop,maya and gaming look for the graphic card..check for no of pixel shader units and raw power...selection of this is difficult...so just compare models based on their score in review.. For students entry level model will be sufficient to save some bucks... For frequent travellers light weight machine with excellent battery life is needed. For others battery life should not be major concerns since will be using lap where charging point is available.. For Jack of all trades master of none go for iMac..lol..

Rathna Kumar

I would start by the intent, what are you going to use it the most for? 1. Lock down on the Price point. 2. Search the internet for all the options you have on that price range online or store. For Gaming: Get a laptop which has a dedicated GPU. For Entertainment: Get a economy sized laptop which has an HDMI output. For Internet/light work load: Economy sized laptop with extra ports for external screens. For Photo/Video editing: More HDD space and a Multi-core CPU (quad core preferably), with a sRGB color space monitor (MVA or s-IPS). This is an all-rounder laptop (price/performance), you can customize it or use this as a guide to buy what you want: http://www.dell.com/ca/p/inspiron-15-3531-laptop/pd

Animesh Jha

Follow the steps: - Decide what you are going to use the laptop for. Make a list and do some research on what is the optimum configuration needed for carrying out those activities. Worry about the graphics card and memory, RAM, HDD, screen resolution and the processor. Find information about them and how they perform for the activities intended. Can you upgrade the RAM needed? Do you really need to worry about the storage space? Can you just get an external HDD instead? Is SSD required? Is the OS that you are going to use perform well with the hardware? What kind of software do you work on? Do they run well with those configurations? Now pick up the lowest matching criteria for your laptop - Find a few laptop matching those criteria. Don't worry about the money yet. Do research on them. An easy way is to search for them along with words like slow, pathetic, problem etc. The idea is to find negative reviews about them. Find the ones with the least number of negative reviews. - Its the time to find deals. Find out a few dealers and bargain for the prices. Look for any discount or cashback offers available. Also, look in the online stores for prices. Be a little flexible with the configurations if they don't match your budget. - Fixate upon one and buy it. If you need an USB hub, keyboard, mouse and a cooling pad, try to get them together for a discount. PS: I followed the exact same procedure a few days ago and bought a [email protected] Processor laptop for less than 35k INR.

Mukunda Madhava Nath

Here in the UK, we have a company called ebuyer.com   On their web site, you can choose from 264 laptops (as of 20/04/2015).  You can use controls on the left to narrow down this range, for example by size, processor, hard disk, price, etc.   http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Computer/cat/Laptops   As to which specification to choose, that depends entirely on what you want to do. In your question, "perfect" might mean... low cost high power available for delivery tomorrow large screen for web browsing, Skype and Office only ...but you haven't specified.

Anwar Mahmood

Before I buy a laptop (or computer), I make a list of the specific software that I need to be able to run. I then got to the computer store and try out all the models that can run the specific software I need. If you can't test the software you need to run, walk away. Make sure the software works exactly as you need it to, remember within certain limits, the machine you buy is never going to work better than the day you bought it, so I alway recommend paying a bit extra and going for a model a bit above what you need now. For my work, I need to run three pieces of software: Logic Pro, Excel and Photoshop. So I was immediately limited to a Mac. I needed maximum transportability, so the MacBook Air range was where I was looking. The top of the line 11" was a bit slow when I tested the software so I looked at the mid spec 13", which ran perfectly for me to do my job. Since I always try and aim a bit higher, I went for the top spec 13". I'm very happy with the machine, and I expect to get around 4 years out of it.

Matt Parsons

Give this article a look. It will help you break down the different options and give you a better idea of what is more important to you: http://hitechmom.com/choosing-the-best-laptop-for-college/

Shana Russell

First consider what do you want to use your laptop for? Browsing the web, word processing etc don't require heavy configurations while gaming(high graphics) and other multitasking activities require lot of memory which in-turn increase the price of laptop.

Sumant Sogikar

There are 2 ways to go about it as Dev and Rathna have already mentioned. Unless you are really passionate about the machines or you need it for high computing work, the first approach is not recommended. For most regular users, they just need to consider two important factors: 1. What is the purpose? 2. What is the budget? And choose one that fits within the two. But for some it's not just some tool they need but something they want to show off! :)

Anonymous

Go to http://digit.in and you will find best suited for you.. there is a tab called "help me decide" where they ask you to set some filter criteria in a question-answer format.. you can also compare.. and the best part- it provides the prices from various different online vendors at a place so as to make it convenient for u to buy..

Jagriti Kumari

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