Laptop Buying Guide 2010

Torn between netbook and notebook? Boggled by dongles? Puzzled by processors? We offer a simple lay of the land for your next laptop purchase.

When you have to jiggle the power connector just right to get your seven-year-old ThinkPad to wheeze to life, only to take 20 minutes to load a YouTube video, it’s time to put the old beast out to pasture and start anew. But where do you begin in today’s notebook market, which has expanded so much that portables now outsell desktops? With a buying guide, of course. Use this comprehensive buying guide to examine some of the key factors and specs to check when buying a new notebook computer.

Size and Form Factor

Unlike on a desktop, where size and shape are an afterthought for a system you’ll likely kick under a desk anyway, the chassis on a laptop makes all the difference in usability. Buy something too small, and you’ll type at half the speed and squint to make out your latest e-mails and Facebook updates. Buy too big, and you’ll pass out from exhaustion after trying to lug the monster from one room to the next.

You’ll find all sorts of ways to describe different classes of laptops, but screen size is the common denominator. At 12 inches and below, portable computers are typically branded as netbooks. Above 12 inches, they’re laptops or notebooks, and somewhere around 16 inches – it gets a little fuzzy – you run into desktop replacements. To add to that confusion, any notebook with a screen that can swivel around and lay flat is typically called a tablet PC, regardless of the size.

If you’re buying a laptop to use all the time as your primary computer, we wouldn’t advise going any smaller than 13.3 inches. Laptops in that tiny size range are easy to tote, but not comfortable enough for that eight-hour date with a term paper, and typically come in light on power as well. A 14- or 15-inch inch screen makes for a good all-around machine that will make you perfectly happy at home or on the road. Stepping up to anything larger typically diminishes portability quite a bit –especially because the large displays and powerful hardware that occupy that space typically drain batteries like kindergarteners drain juice boxes. But if you plan to use them at home most of the time, you’ll find the computing experience almost like using a desktop.

Processor

The most important bit of hardware in your notebook can also be one of the most difficult to choose. Between Intel and AMD, models lines including Pentium, Core 2 Duo, Athlon, Sempron, and more, GHz ratings that aren’t comparable between companies, things start to look pretty complicated. PCWorld offers one of the most comprehensive guides on the subject, but let’s look at just the basics.

For most users, two is the magic number for cores. Two cores will offer excellent multitasking capability, and because they’ve become a de facto standard for new PCs, they’re reasonably affordable, too. Three or four cores will obviously offer more performance – especially for processor-intense applications like video editing – but most users simply won’t take advantage of all the extra horsepower, and you won’t find them until you step up to about 16 inches.

Clock speeds (ex. 3.2GHz) are still an important indicator of CPU performance, but can only really be compared within similar lines. A 2.0GHz Intel Atom processor is faster than 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, but not necessarily faster than a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Other factors include front-side bus speed, onboard cache, whether it’s a 32- or 64-bit processor, and many more. Check out PCWorld’s guide if you really want to understand how they all interact to make up performance.

As with many aspects of PC buying, you generally get what you pay for, so let price be a rough guide to processors when the tangle of naming schemes and specs proves to be a little bit too much, and do research on the individual processor you’re considering buying to get a better idea how it will perform with what you intend to use it for.

Also keep in mind that the most powerful processors eat up the most battery life. Even if you have the extra cash to throw around, picking up an oinker of a processor might come back to bite you if you plan to spend the majority of your computing time away from an outlet.

Memory

With operating systems and software gobbling up more and more memory as time wears on (Outlook alone is gobbling up 125MB on the PC we’re writing this on), this is not an area where you want to skimp. The 32-bit version of Windows (whether XP, Vista or Windows 7) can only make use of up to 4GB of RAM, and that’s the amount we recommend you look for, considering how inexpensive it typically is.

That said, remember that RAM is easy to install yourself, so you can buy less to begin with and add more if you find performance lacking. Just be sure the configuration your PC comes in will allow you to add more (ordering 2GB on a motherboard with two DIMM slots might get you two 1GB sticks, meaning you’ll have to toss one of the old sticks to add more). For a desktop running Windows 7 or Windows Vista, consider 1GB the bare minimum.

Video Card

Laptops aren’t typically the first choice of gamers, but if you plan do any gaming outside of five-year-old titles and casual titles like Plants vs. Zombies, you’re going to need a discrete video card. ATI and Nvidia are the two major players in this space.

Unlike a desktop purchase, where manufacturers might offer you any number of available cards for a computer, laptops manufacturers will typically only offer a couple, if any at all. If you’re looking for a specific model, you might actually have to let your choice of video card guide you to a notebook, rather than vice versa. In general, let price be your guide. At the high end, the most expensive cards can easily stack on hundreds of dollars for a sliver of extra performance, while at the bottom end, spending $50 for any graphics card at all can offer a massive boost in performance. We recommend sticking to the bottom end for the best value, unless you’re sure you’ll take advantage of all the extra horsepower. Consider 512MB “standard” for a graphics card and 1GB supreme.

If battery life is a concern, consider a notebook with switchable graphics, like Lenovo’s U550. This will let you run at full bore on a discrete card when you’re out for blood, then switch back to a more efficient integrated graphics card when you’re just surfing or piddling around, and want to preserve battery life. Notebooks with Nvidia’s new Optimus platform will even switch automatically for you.