What Should I Look For When Buying A Laptop?

By | May 29, 2014

woman with macbookFollowing on from my earlier article on What Laptop Should I Buy? I thought it’d be a good idea to write a follow-up on what should a person look for if they’ve made the decision to go out and buying a laptop. There are two main considerations when going out to buy a laptop: 1st your requirements and 2nd your budget.

For simple tasks like browsing the internet and checking emails coupled with a bit of basic office work such as writing a letter or updating a spreadsheet, any laptop currently on the market should handle quite adequately. The problems arise when you need the laptop to do something other than what it was originally purchased to do such as editing photos from your digital camera or maybe editing a home video from your camcorder. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop (or its cheaper equivalents) require much more processing power than is required for typing a letter for example. That’s not to say that a budget laptop won’t do the task – it is to say though that you shouldn’t expect it to be done quickly. Laptops based on celeron processors for example can have great difficulty dealing with some video applications or FreeView dongles. I found this out the hard way!!!

You absolutely must, at this stage, decide what you need your new laptop to do because you can’t upgrade the graphics chip or processor later on. You might be lucky – especially at the budget end of the spectrum – and find that your laptop will do what you need, but you must remember that a budget laptop is cheap for a reason. You get nothing for free these days and laptops are no exception – like everything else, you get what you pay for.

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