Don’t by a laptop or notebook you will regret folks, I have decided to write this post after seeing advertisements for a variety of laptops at the local electronics stores in the paper.
When purchasing a laptop there are some key critical things you want to consider and the order of importance changes with what you want from your laptop.
- CPU Power
- Memory
- Hard Drive Size
- Battery Life
- Screen Size
- Video RAM (Gamer specific requirement)
If you want do to video watching, editing, recording you will obviously want a laptop with more of everything, but you sacrifice battery life when you get a larger screen and a more powerful CPU. Though many laptops throttle CPU speed to maximize the battery life you will still lose hours the more power your laptop has.
That being said, the difference between a crappy laptop and a laptop you will enjoy is likely to be only $50 – $100. It doesn’t matter if you want just an internet laptop or one for occasional note taking. Spend the extra $50 – $100 and get a laptop with a decent processor. Do not settle for an Intel Celeron processor which will lack the basic processing power to open multiple applications, run any sort of games or multimedia applications well and will be noticeably slower than if you get a Core 2 Duo or AMD processors.
A new decent laptop that will appeal to most casual users can cost you between $399 and $599 dollars, with one appealing to gamers being a few hundred dollars more for the dedicated video memory and extra disk capacity and CPU power.
I have had five different laptop brands over the years including Acer, HP, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba and my own personal preference is Dell every time. I have a Dell laptop and I even gave my son the Dell 15" Inspiron I won in an online contest several months ago. They are reliable, stable and tend to have less problems than any other model I have used. This is only my own experience, I know people who really rave about the Sony Vaio laptops which are great but are pricier than counterpart notebooks.
Also, when shopping for notebooks or netbooks you should always leverage the web to try and find coupons. I like ordering laptops from manufacturer websites because you can customize the options then and there which you often can’t do in a store that sells "preconfigured" laptops with little wiggle room on what you want to upgrade or swap out.
You can always find a Dell coupon over at savings.com and in most cases save an additional 10-20% off of laptop costs to give you even more of a reason to purchase a laptop sooner rather than later.
-Dragon Blogger
