What To Look For In A Good Laptop

With it coming up to the start of the school/college/university year, it is that time of year that many people start looking to update their laptops with new ones. For the majority of people, price will be the main factor that will affect what laptop they will buy. After all, laptops range from $100 to over $5000! However, just because you have a certain budget does not always mean you do not have a choice to what laptop you should buy. For this reason, here are a few factors which should help you decide a laptop that is best for you within your budget.

1. Screen size – In general, the bigger the screen on a laptop, the more expensive it will be. This is why it is usually a good move to go for a laptop around 13 inches because it is small enough to take the price down on a laptop and still large enough to allow you to use it as a normal laptop. As well as this, full HD screens should be a necessity to laptops especially with the recent release of Windows 10.
2. Hard drive – Size is not always everything with hard drivers nowadays as many people now store all of their photos and documents online on online storages like Google Drive. Therefore, I would say a 256GB SSD (solid state drive) is a much better choice than a 1TB hard drive. As well as making your computer start up quicker and generally faster, it is also more secure and less prone to errors and damage.
3. RAM – Random Access Memory or RAM enables your computer to multi task with the more RAM you have, the better. You should really not look at anything below 8GB now (although the number is always increasing as laptops generally get better year by year). It is also a necessity to make sure the RAM is DDR3 or higher too.
4. Processor – Possibly one of the most important parts to the laptop, what type of processor you choose will mainly depend on your budget. From experience, I have made some general rules to processors such that 1) Stay away from AMD as the AMD equivalent of Intel is never as good and 2) Make sure you have a dedicated and separate graphics card. This is because if you do not have this, part of the processor space will be taken up by a inbuilt graphics card which generally is much slower than a separate graphics card.
5. Metal if possible – If you can, always try to get a metal laptop. This is because many laptops are still prone to overheating. If your laptop is plastic, due to plastic’s good insulation level, the heat will struggle to dissipate away from the laptop. With metal designs, the metal conducts the heat away much more effectively resulting in a laptop that can run faster, or at maximum capacity without getting hot.
6.  Tiled keyboard – Many laptops still come with keyboards that are not tiled: in the sense that every key is right next to the next one so there is no gap between them. These keyboards are generally quite hard to type on. Therefore, try to make sure you get a tiled keyboard where there is a large space between each key button to enable efficient typing.