What Is The Best Laptop

Asking what is the best laptop Its a bit like asking which car manufacturer makes the best cars, so its all relative to the person looking for a laptop in regards to their needs and requirements – so really there is no best laptop.
Finding one that’s right for your needs.
Firstly we need to begin with a common specification that is a good standard for most laptops – Wireless and wired network cards should be built in – 2gb or ram as a minimum and the hard drive needs be at least 80gb or more, just about every new operating system, latest applications or games are usually always larger than older versions requiring much more hard drive storage space, and now even a 60gb hard drive is usually not large enough.

What else needs to be considered? Size / Portability – Processor or CPU – Operating system – Graphics – USB Ports – CD/DVD drive – Screen Size – Aesthetics – Laptop Role – Saving Money.

Size / Portability – the most common laptop screen sizes are between 13-15 inches, due to this it generally means the lowest prices, which is great if you are out to save some money, but if you travel around a lot then a heavy laptop could work out to be more in Osteopath fees than the total cost of the laptop, so if you travel a lot a small laptop is a real blessing, after all even if the laptop itself is not too heavy, by the time we add the mains adapter, a padded case, plus anything else you need to carry, it can start to get pretty heavy specially if carried around for a while. The same cannot really be said for 17” laptops, if your looking for something with a larger screen that is fine, but if you need to travel at all why not invest in a small laptop and put the extra money towards getting a 19” external screen which is bigger and can also be used in conjunction with the laptop screen, in effect giving two screens.

CPU or Processor – The processor has changed a lot over the last few years and it now seems many companies are bolting on more processor cores. At present a laptop needs to have a dual core processor or above to run well. Dual core is the standard at the moment with AMD’s Turion 64 x2 and Intel’s Core 2 Duo, both are very good processors, but personally I’ve found AMD has the edge due to it being a bit cheaper, but if you do not mind waiting and have the money there are some of the Quad core laptops coming onto the market any time now.

Vista or XP – If you want a laptop that has Windows XP but you have found you can only purchase it with Windows Vista installed (which is very common) make sure you can actually install XP before your simply wipe away Vista and replace it with XP, a lot of new pc hardware will not have XP drivers written for it, and as such this can create major problems when trying to change over to XP. In this case most people have to waste more time reinstalling Vista again.

Graphics – it is usually impossible to upgrade the graphics on a laptop, usually whatever it has is what you stuck with, so if you are into gaming or high end graphics make sure the laptop has a graphics card with dedicated memory, otherwise graphic ability will suffer if used for gaming or high end graphics.

USB ports – you can never have enough of them, the average amount of USB ports on a laptop is around 4 this may sound like a lot, but after you’ve plugged in a keyboard – mouse – printer – pen drive there is none left, you can always purchase a hub, but why not purchase a machine with more than you need in the first place. On another note, just about every laptop now has USB 2 ports, but it is not hard to double check this as USB 1 is around 10 times slower.