How to Buy a New Laptop: Part 1
We have a member of our community Omar Rabadi who recently picked up a notebook computer and had some tips that he learned as he went to the process and he said he like to share them with the rest of the community at YouTube as well as www live.pirillo.com which is where we are streaming this video experience live in the chatters down here below. Hey chatters.
Top five tips for buying a laptop.
Number one, the build quality of a laptop is more important than you might think. Not only our poorly built laptops more likely to breakdown but they are more likely to have overheating prompts and therefore run slower. If your laptop is going to be leaving the house several times a week, built quality is more important than it is if you are not going to leave the house very often.
Look closely at the laptops and stores and read reviews online from websites wherever you like to go to read up on reviews. More than just going to websites, I am actually going to suggest that you ask your peers whether it is your friends or that people in the chat room or the folks in YouTube subscribed at the same channel as you do. They are going to give you the skinny about any kind of product and give it to you straight from the heart. You know it is going to be as unbiased as your friends can be.
Number two, similar to build quality look at the quality of the keyboard. This is especially important if you will be doing a lot of typing. A poorly constructed keyboard will become very frustrating to type on. Oh! That is so true. You know I have really been frustrated with a lot of laptop manufacturers, your notebook computers and specifically with the keyboard and the placement of the windows key. If they even put it on there, I am used to it in a certain position and when they put it off on the left field or right field as the case might be just drives me up the wall. More importantly, how do the keys feel? Are they too squished together? Or, are they spaced out evenly, I mean these are all very important things to consider. Keyboard is a big one, if your keyboard is not good you are not going to like using that computer.
Three, mobility versus screen size, if a laptop is really going to leave the house like when you are on vacation then you are going to be better off with the laptop with a 15 inches to 17 inches screen it is probably going to be more appropriate. However, if you are going to be taking the laptop to school or café on a regular basis you probably want something more mobile in the 12 to 14 inch range although you should look at the actual weight of the of the machine not just the screen size and beyond screen size, screen resolution. When it came time for us to pick up the max the Mac book pros for NomeDex our conference it was a debate between the 15 inch with the LDD back lit screen or the 17 inch with the much higher resolutions and slightly a dated screen technology. I went for resolution and I have not regretted it one single bit.
This is like what 19, hang on I always forget give me a second, hold on the option, system profile or I will give you the exact resolution just a second. I think it is like 19 x 20 X 1200 screen resolution on this 17 inch Mac book Pro. Oh! I love it so much. Anything less than that is simply uncivilized, I mean you cannot go from one of these 30 inch or two of these 30 inch babies to something even this small is frustrating like where did my pixels go, I want my pixels back. But it is important to keep in mind not just the screen size but the screen resolution itself. I mean if I had a 30 inch monitory but it is only capable of handling 1024 x 768 WTS dude, so watch the screen resolution as you do screen size, you needed actual measurements.
And by the way, just to clarify for those who may not understand the difference of resolution, it is the number of pixels by the number of pixels where a screen size is typically measured diagonally like this is 17 inch from this corner down to this corner and the amount of pixels on the screen are 1920 x 1200 on this particular screen. So, the more pixels, the better the resolution the more stuff you can have on the screen at the same time. Typically the sharper things are going to be on that screen.
Okay, number four, specifications. I have recommended everyone to stay away from single core processors these days. You might think, you do not need more than a single core if you are only doing basic tasks and surfing the web but you might be surprised that how draining seemingly simple tasks can be when you have several programs open at the same time. Furthermore, budget laptops are only slightly more expensive than the single core laptops that are less expensive. So, even if it is just a basic dual core something with two processors or two cores is not going to be that much more than a single core system. Spend the extra money on that extra processor that is my recommendation too by the way.
I have read a lot of conflicting information on the hierarchy of processors, it is okay I think ultimately it boils down to benchmarks and real world applications, you know what you are using it for, what programs you have running all the time, what programs you do have running all the time? If your operating system can handle it? Windows probably it cannot. See here, keep in mind that even though some of these processors there is small differences, they can actually be a substantial difference in performance between the laptops. So, even if you are looking at two computers and you are saying well they are essentially the same but that one is $50.000 cheaper I will just go with the cheaper laptop.
Dude, if you have the $50.00 to spend, I have said this from day one when it comes to a computer it does not matter specifically which one you get. You know watch for specials, watch for deals, watch for coupons, do a search on my blog at chris.pirillo.com I may have coupons for you. But do not screw up and say when it comes to hardware, okay? Tagjag.com is another good place, thank you the username Google.
This is important, if you have the $50.00 to spend, spend it on the hardware.
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