Which Laptop is Best For You?
Looking to buy a laptop in the near feature but still not quite sure which laptop is for you? Then you’ve come to the right place. This laptop guide will help you decide which type of laptop is for you. You’ve probably seen the myriad of options that are available and the price you can pay is huge. You can get laptops under 500, laptops under 300, and even laptops under 200 dollars. However, you can also get laptops over 2000 dollars. This huge range in prices usually leads to people paying way to much for too much computer for their needs. The hope is that you will be able to figure out exactly which computer is right for you.
The basic layout of the rest of this guide is as follows. You can scan down to find the user that best fits what you will be using the computer for and read about the things to look for in which computer you will want to buy. Then some price estimates of what you should expect to pay. Then finally some recommendations of computers that will fit your needs.
Computer Users
- Web Surfer
- The Gamer
- Students
- Movie and TV Addict
- The Multimedia Guru
- Commercial and Industrial users
1. Web Surfer
The web surfer is the typical parent or high school girl who uses the computer to read and send emails, look up the latest stock prices, update their Facebook status, find a new recipe online, watch the occasional funny Youtube video someone forwarded you, or blog stalk people you’ve never met in real life. This category fits most people who use the internet today. Which type of computer should this person buy? The web surfer has a couple options based on some other factors they need to think about.
- Is mobility something you want in your laptop?
- How good are your eyes?
- Is this laptop just a desktop replacement?
In actuality these are just three different questions that address the same issue. What size of laptop do you want. You can get laptops that are smaller than a pad of paper or almost as big as a desktop. So how much computer do you need or want? Well if you are on the go, a salesman, a kid, or someone else in the need of great mobility a new generation of small laptops called netbooks may be perfect for you. However if you are mom at home surfing blogs, or a high school student or work in an office and need to be writing reports and various papers then maybe a the largest of laptops, the 17″ is what you want. Maximum viewing space, largest foot print, and heaviest by far. But perhaps you aren’t in one of these two extreme categories you say, which laptop should you chose then? Well then you can pick from the middle of the pack, either the 13 or 15 inch laptops.
Some of the other decisions you will need to make when you buy a computer from an online vendor, such as Dell, HP, or Apple is what processor to get, how much RAM you’ll need, and what size hard disk to purchase. For the Web Surfer you don’t need the top of the line in any of these three areas. For a processor pretty much anything that has an i on the front of the name, like an i3, i5, or i7 will all likely provide what you need. Of course the higher the number the faster the processor and the more expensive it will be. Generally speaking a Intel i5 processor is probably still more than what most Web Surfers require. Many of the laptops in the lower price ranges will come with Intel Celeron processors that are more than capable enough to deal with whatever the internet can throw at it.
The RAM amount you’ll need to perform most of your tasks is likely to be less than the salesmen will try to sale you. New laptops can come with up to 8 GBs of RAM. But web surfers will likely never even get close to using that much unless they try to open ten pictures that are huge and have very high resolution. Other than that browsing, listen to music, watching Youtube, writing a paper, and just about anything else you can throw at it won’t go about 3 GBs. So you can choose the 4 GB option to be on the safe side, but you can get away with 2 GB without ever noticing that you didn’t get 4.
Picking the hard drive capacity is the last area where people can pay for something they have no need for. For most people 500 GB is enough to store thousands of songs, thousand of pictures, and hours of video without ever reaching the limit of the hard drive. Most programs are small and won’t take up more than half a gig on the large side ( games may take up to as much as a gig), so personal files like music, pictures, and movies are the main things you have to consider. If you want to be storing a lot of home movies (or any type of movie for that matter) then you may want to look for something a little bit bigger. Video files are significantly larger than pictures or songs, so if the number of videos is substantial you may need over 1 terabyte of space. If the laptop doesn’t come with a large enough hard drive built in you can easily purchase an external hard drive and hold your video archives on it. External hard drive prices are getting extremely cheap so can expect to find deals on 2 TB hard drives for under $90.
So you’ve decided that you are in the Web Surfer and want to know how much you should expect to pay? Ball park figures range from $300 to $600. But be careful because all the little extra bells and whistles that manufacturers try to get you to buy can add up quickly and turn your bargain computer into and over powered and over priced beast.
2. The Gamer
The Gamer is a person who looks for two things in a laptop, speed and graphics. The two things drive gamers to spend vast amounts of money on the newest processor and most powerful graphics card. Gamers are usually on the bleeding edge of technology and they pay the big price tag that comes with that. Gamers will typically stay away from laptops entirely because they don’t have the ability to keep adding more and more graphics cards and solid state drives like desktops do. But when the gamer is forced/wants to game on the go the standard they look to is the Alienware brand, which has been purchased by Dell. The Alienware computers don’t sacrifice very much in the move from desktop to laptop. They are basically a slightly lower power draw version of what you can get in a desktop.
In a gaming laptop you can get the i7 mobile processor, which is basically a tuned version of the standard i7 that requires less power, enabling the battery in a laptop to last a semireasonable amount of time. In fact, if you want the i7 processor you are required by Alienware to purchase a 9-cell battery so you don’t run out of juice just turning the computer on. The graphics card, a GTX 460M, is similar to the i7 in that it is the lower power version of the desktop GTX 460. Its still a beast of a graphics card, just in a tinier package.
Another costly upgrade that will speed up your system considerably is a solid state drive. They have no moving spindles that need to spin up, seek, and then read. They function kind of like RAM, in the fact that they can pull a file from any location on the disk almost instantly. But because they are only a few years old you can’t get as big a drive as a standard hard drive and on top of that you will pay around twenty times the price/GB of a standard disk drive.
If you are a true die hard gamer and price is of no consequence to your desire for speed and graphics then you can get all that your heart desires, but will pay up over $3500 for that pleasure.
3. Students
Laptops for students don’t have to be the fastest laptops out there. They can be middle of the road laptops. However, because part of school is about being social and meeting other people, many students will want their laptops to look good on the outside. This is one of the main reasons why Apple computers, such as MacBooks or MacBook Pros have gained a lot of ground on college campuses. But students should be aware that they don’t have to buy an overpriced Mac to get a sleek looking laptop. Sony has made itself to be the Mac of the PC world. There laptops are more expensive than the Acer or the HP laptops, but they make up for it with their killer stylings and top notch performance.
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Tags: gaming, laptop, students, which laptop
