Things to consider when buying a Laptop

There are many brands of laptops out there and many models to choose from. How can one decide what should be important? Here are a few things to watch for when buying a laptop.

1. Warranty / Service Plan - The portable nature of laptops means they will fail. You need a warranty. I need a warranty. I've used my warranty on my 6 month old laptop to have the motherboard replaced. But you don't just need any warranty plan, a good plan can save the day, or week in most cases. Most store protection plans will require that you bring the laptop to the store and they will send it out to some service center for repair. Or some service plans will send you a box and you mail it off to some other state across the country. You will be out of service for 5-10 days. That is not acceptable for most people that I know. SO I recommend an "At Home" or "At Office" warranty plan. That's the kind of warranty I have. In my case, the technicial brought the parts to my house, and replaced it in about an hour. Dell provides this type of service plan as an option. So does IBM.

2. Memory - Windows XP is happy with 512MB, but 1GB is better. Vista will crawl on anything less than 1GB. 2GB is better. Memory is cheap anyway.

3. Graphic Subsystem - (See my blog article "Performance Computing" for more details) For best performance, you should buy a laptop (or any computer for that matter) that has a separate graphics card and separate graphics memory, NOT SHARED MEMORY. This one thing will increase the performance of your computer dramatically!!

4. Software - Software cost money to produce. If you need to use Microsoft Office, you should buy Microsoft Office. No, I'm not happy increasing Bill's net worth from 52,000,000,000 to 53,000,000,000 but I believe that work done is due credit. I did buy Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite, and several other expensive applications.

5. Backup drive - Buy an inexpensive Western Digital or Maxtor external USB drive and run backups regularly. Hard drives DO fail. In 1 year alone, I dealt with 6 real estate agents that had failed hard drives. Of those 6, 2 backed up their data. 1 on a regular basis (daily), the other on a 6 month basis. The other 4 lost everything. I back up every day or two. (see my blog entry about backups).

The rest is more or less subjective. Processor speed is much less an issue these days. Even a 1.8Ghz is plenty for most of todays applications. I run a 1.8ghz dual core with 2GB of RAM running Vista and it's very fast. But I run AutoCAD 2008, Photoshop CS2, Adobe Premier Elements, and a few other heavy duty applications such as Outlook. I don't have any problems with any of these apps because of the choices made above.

Hard Drive size is also subjective. I have an 80GB drive and it's just ok for what I do. But I have over 6,000 photos that take up over 12GB of the drive. The rest of my data is over 25,000 files, and takes up another 12GB. Hard Drive spindle speed is important if you are looking for a high performance computer. A hard drive that is spinning at 7200rpm will access data faster than a 5400rpm drive, which is in turn, faster than a 4200rpm drive. But faster hard drives generate somewhat more heat. It's a tradeoff.

Screen size is dependent on what you want. I went with a 15.4" widescreen with a resolution of 1680x1050.