The chances are high that your parents believed back in days that a laptop is a whim rather than a necessity. However, nowadays, a rare person can do without a laptop, whether it is about a college student, an IT specialist, or your grandma. This device has gathered a big army of admirers, and it is not for nothing. But to be completely satisfied with your purchase, you should make a small investigation to choose the best suitable option that will meet all your requirements.
Table of Contents
1. Decide on why you need a laptop
It is obvious that an old lady, a college student, and a web designer need different options since they will use them for different things. You can turn to a paper helper even via your smartphone, but you should have a decent and powerful device to play video games or work on a web project. Many people are too focused on the cost of a laptop that they turn a blind eye to some crucial parameters. Such an approach will result in regret in a week after your purchase since a well-known brand and high price do not guarantee that you will get what really suits you. Therefore, first, it is worth deciding for what purpose you are getting a laptop and only then proceed to choose the required parameters.
2. Don’t fall for the stated battery life
College students and freelancers who like to work in coffee shops and parks are interested in laptops that can boast of the most impressive amount of battery life. Usually, people don’t bother themselves with finding out under what conditions the test was run, so they buy a cat in the sack. But testers create general conditions that will hardly correspond to reality. Thus, the chances are high that the screen backlight will always be brighter, and at least several programs will run in the background. So, the stated 15 hours of work can be a soap bubble, and you will get 8 hours at best if you really use your laptop. It is worth studying reviews on the Internet where people use real testing conditions.
3. Pay attention to the processor even if you are a non-gamer
It is a common mistake to believe that if you don’t play video games, any laptop will be enough for working with documents, multimedia, and surfing the Internet. When choosing a model, many users are guided by the low price of the device, losing sight of the fact that a laptop has an outdated processor with low efficiency. At first, you might be satisfied with the working characteristics of your purchase since office applications and surfing the web don’t require much efficiency. However, you should bear in mind that as soon as Windows run an update in the background, your laptop will turn into a pumpkin.
4. It is worth opting for a dual data drive
Many manufacturers save on additional slots in laptops by installing only one data drive. When you opt for such a model, for example, with a fast SSD, you risk losing a system and personal data. The option with one HDD is also not preferable since this type of data drive demonstrates low data exchange rates. Your system will load slowly, and slow processing of data on papercoach.net or any other website will get on your nerves. Therefore, when choosing a robust laptop, give preference to a dual data drive system SSD + HDD.
5. A discrete graphics card is not a must
You can choose either an integrated or discrete graphics card. The former uses the graphics core of the processor and does not have its own memory. Nonetheless, modern integrated graphics cards can boast of a sufficient level of performance. A discrete graphics card is a separate video chip with its own memory. They are more productive and expensive. It is worth opting for this option if you are going to edit video on a laptop, play games or perform other resource-demanding tasks. Thus, if you are not going to deal with overly complex graphics like 3D, you can choose a decent integrated graphics card, for example, Intel Graphics.
6. Don’t believe much in the stated performance
The ability of a laptop to handle complex tasks is a very vague value. When you see in the description that a gaming laptop is productive, it means that you can play modern video games at high graphics settings and fast frame rates. But when you choose a “typewriter” on Intel Core m, your “productive” laptop will be able to open several browser tabs simultaneously at best.
7. Go deep down, choosing Intel processor
Intel plays a crucial role in the computer processor market, and each processor has its own code name, consisting of a family name and an index indicating a specific model. But the name of the family itself can be about both a productive gaming processor and an economical option. You can distinguish processors only by indexes, so it is not worth dwelling just on the family. And with the release of the seventh-generation Intel Core, the corporation has included several times slower chips in the i5 and i7 family. Thus, you should go deep down when choosing Intel processors.
8. Pay attention to the cooling system
Nowadays, many manufacturers install passive cooling in light laptops. The lack of fans makes such laptops completely silent, but this silence can be harmful when it comes to energetically demanding activities. Sometimes, the cooling system cannot cope with heat dissipation, so its frequency is forcibly reduced to protect the processor from overheating. As a result, performance goes down, and everything starts working slowly. While in active cooling systems, the fan speed simply increases in such situations, and the processor frequency remains unchanged.
9. Choose an appropriate RAM type
Here you can adhere to the rule “the more, the better.” However, the type of RAM modules used is of key importance. In most cases, you will run into DDR3 and DDR4 models since they are the most popular in the market. There is no big difference in performance between them, but the cost of DDR4 is much higher. The main differences of the newer memory are higher frequencies and lower power consumption.
10. A good display is a must
If you are going to spend many hours on your laptop, you should take care of your eyesight. Many manufacturers install glossy displays since the picture looks juicier on them, but such matrices have many glares. Thus, your eyes will get tired faster. So, you should opt for a matte display or a glossy with an anti-reflection coating.
Whoa a good deal of good information.