subject: Things To Know When Buying Laptops [print this page] Computers are fast becoming a need rather than a want in every day society, so there are very people who dont own one or at least have access to one. When it comes to buying new laptops, the choice can become slightly overwhelming. A lot of retailers write about their specifications, which generally does not mean a lot to the majority of us and so the best thing to do when buying new laptops is to read customer reviews and compare the features and functions online to find out as much about them as possible.
The first thing to do is to determine whether you are a general user or a serious user. General users might play a few games, play a bit of music or maybe watch a DVD. Serious users are likely to want to play games with quality graphics constantly and download media at the same time and they are therefore going to need a lot more space than a general user and will need a much higher storage capacity.
Generally, the bottom line for a day to day functional laptop is going to be around 2GB of ram. Any more than this is great, but look at somewhere around twice the size if you are considering yourself as a serious user. 2GB will not be sufficient enough to download and play games at the same time, so keep that in mind.
The good thing is that hard drives used to be the expensive part of laptops. Nowadays they are not so expensive, so upgrading to a slightly larger one is a great idea. Alongside this, make sure that you have plenty of USB points for dongles, mice, keyboards and so on.
One tip would be to look for a laptop with a fairly small drive, but have a USB mounted alongside this. Generally portable items like USB hard drives are going to be slightly more expensive, but its great for people that realise that they really do need the extra capacity.
Something that a lot of people do not take into consideration, but wish they did, is battery life. Laptops are meant to be portable, so it is a pretty useless product if you are tied to a plug socket all day. Some of the weaker models will only last for around 45 minutes, which is obviously not ideal. Finding a laptop that has a battery life of around 4 hours is certainly not unreasonable, so focus on that.
Finally, think about where this is likely to be used for the most part. If it will be used whilst travelling, then you might want to focus on smaller laptops. For people that are going to be using it around the home, laptops with bigger screens will probably be ideal.
