Tips for Making a Wise Laptop Purchase.

How to Select the Best Laptop?

Choosing the right laptop is a tedious and time consuming job and needs to be properly planned before making any selection. There is a wide range of laptops, and their prices vary from $200 to over $2,000. The available budget, nature of work, access to the right market and availability of spares are the matter that needs to be addressed before making any purchase decision.

Here is a guideline that will help you in making a wise laptop purchase:

How to Select the Best Fitted Laptop?

1. Prefer laptops with your favorite operating system:

Apple MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops are universal so that they can also run Windows operating system in addition to their built-in OS. However, Apple laptops cost significantly more. In addition to the operating system, deciding on the optimum brand should also be based on things like Bluetooth, touch screen, Wi-Fi, TV tuners, etc. These features are not available with a few options Apple offers.

2. The available budget?

If you are not going to spend an astronomic amount of money and you need a laptop for managing your business activities, then Netbook would be a reasonable best choice for you. Netbooks are very smart and small in size.  Netbooks have enough resources such as high processor speed, more RAM and huge storage space. However, they can’t boast enough battery backup time. So if you are looking for a budget-friendly option and need a light weight laptop, Netbook is the best selection.

You can opt for laptops priced under $500 or even cheaper if need it for surfing the Internet, word processing or making presentations. The reason for cheaper prices is that these laptops have slow processor speed with a small screen (e.g. 15.6”). In this category usually the size and weight matters a lot. Smaller and slim laptops cost more.

With budget ranging from $600 to $1000 you can get a faster and smarter laptop. These laptops usually weight 4 to 6 pounds and boast up to 16” display with scalable hard drive of 500 GB. Due to light weight, faster processing and better battery backup, these laptops are growing in popularity these days.

If you have a reasonable budget over $1,000, you can search for the latest laptop, lightest in weight, with a smart display up to 13-inch or even less. These laptops are considered to be the best replacement to desktop computers with giant 17-inch screens and more power consumption.

3. Prepare a Priority checklist

Have a look on your workload and nature of work for an Ideal Laptop.

A. Entertainment and Multimedia? Prefer laptops with larger screens usually 15-inch display, higher resolution and high definition displays minimum 1920×1800 pixels. Next, you’d better look for larger hard drive for storing archive. The laptop must have a minimum 750GB hard drive. A Blue-Ray player, HDMI ports, wireless TV streaming and wireless broadband card are other must-have features.

B. Portability and ease in Travel? Portability and ease in travelling are vital issues and must be considered while choosing the best laptop. Longer battery backup will provide you with the opportunity to use your mobile while on the move. Battery backup time of 6 hours or more is desirable.

C.Fun for Graphics and multimedia Gaming? For getting the optimum performance, your laptop must have a larger and high-definition screen, lots of RAM (4GB memory is low and 8 GB is better), a dedicated video graphics card (3d card) and, the last but not the least, quad-core processor for optimum performance.

For Normal workload and best price, look for 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 for famous brands. Once you have come through your requirements vs priorities in the above list, it’s now the time to find the laptops that fit the bill.

5. Make up a comparison chart/ table for final decision. Finally, I will suggest that you create a comparison chart/table comparing several top brands. You could list the specs such as processor, memory, screen size, hard drive, graphics card, etc. along with prices to make your final purchase decision.

Katrin Deres,

Post by Katrin Deres, blogger who loves to write about mobile apps and internet technologies. He works in a company that develops spy app mSpy – http://www.mireview.com/blog/mspy-review/.