What Do I Look For In A Laptop?

Buying a laptop/notebook can be very confusing as there is such a huge price range and many brands and configurations to buy from. I will try and help you out with this.

I like the company www.powernotebooks.com since they have excellent tech support in the US and they natively speak English which is a big plus. They sell custom built laptops.

NEVER buy a laptop because it is the cheapest thing you can find. The cheap ones tend to break down the most and are very slow. Try and look for a laptop that is $1000 or more.

CPU

What is this CPU thing that the laptop description is talking about? These are the brains of the laptops or more commonly known as the CPU/Processor.

Celeron, Core Solo/Duo, Pentium Dual Core, Athlon XP, and Sempron based laptops are very slow. These usually come with the sub $1k laptops. Only buy a laptop with one of these if all you are looking to do is basic word processing, surfing the internet, or emailing.

Centrino 2 and Core 2 Duo are made by Intel and are much more powerfull then the cheaper Celeron, Core Solo, Athlon XP, and Sempron CPUs. The Centrino, Pentium M, Pentium 4, and Core Duo are now being phased out and replaced by the Core 2 Duo which basically houses 2 CPUs under the same roof.

Athlon 64, Turion, and Turion x2 are made by AMD and are also much more powerful then the Celeron, Core Solo, Athlon XP, and Sempron CPUs. The Athlon 64 and Turion are being phased out by the newer Turion x2 CPU which like the Core Duo houses 2 CPUs.

Intel i3, i5, and i7 processors just came out. The i3 is the new celeron, the i5 is their mid grade cpu, and the i7 is their high end cpu.

What to pick Intel or AMD? This is a very hard question to answer as they are very similar in speed and reliability now. Right now Intel's Core 2 Duo processor is king, last year it was AMD. It varies year to year though for Intel vs AMD.

Memory

The more of this in the laptop the faster it is. The cheaper ones come with around 1GB or 2GB which is enough for you to crawl around. Windows loves memory and the more the merrier. The minimum that I would recommend is 2GB but if you can swing it pick one up with 4GB or more.

Video Card

This is another vital part to the laptop which effects speed. What you want to look out for is if it says "integrated" video card anywhere on it. Laptops with these are VERY slow as they steal memory and resources from the other components in the laptop. So what you want to look for is a "dedicated" video card with at least 512MB dedicated ram. Usually the ones with dedicated video cards are more pricey then integrated.

Screen Configurations

This part can be confusing. You tend to see in laptop descriptions XGA, WXGA, SXGA, WSXGA, WUSXGA and various other conbinations of "xga" describing the screen. The "W" in front means it is a widescreen. The picture quality goes from XGA being the worst to SXGA being very good to UXGA being the best.