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For the most part, shelling out some funds for a laptop can be a pretty exciting thing. Especially when you are doing it as a necessity rather than for fun. Most of the time its for both reasons which even more so justifies the purchase with out having to be yelled at by the wifey, girlfriend or even your wallet. Things don't have to be complicated when purchasing a laptop to fit the needs and wants of any guy.
When buying a laptop, one should be asking himself what he'll be doing with the laptop. Will he be just using it for word processing, email and surfing the web? Will he be using it for minor digital photo editing, beginner video editing and minor power use such as backing up data? Or will he be willing to shell out top dollar for a high end top of the line gaming and intense processing rig? These are the questions that one should ask himself before making an unsound decision and letting the unqualified goons at your local big chain electronics retail store make these decisions for you.
Many times I have desperate mothers asking me what they should do when their kids are asking for a laptop for school or whatever other activities they need or want one for. Usually I respond with a powerful question, what will your kid be doing with such a devise? Many times mom and dads have no clue. And more that often their kids have sold them on the idea that they are in dire need of an overly priced laptop exceeding $1,500 just to surf the web. This is not necessary!
For beginners and chronic web surfers, I recommend that most people start with a simple non expensive laptop. These laptops usually range between the $400-$700 with or without rebates. One can usually find a good deal on any Sunday Ads paper with such deals. These deals come in many different brands: HP, Everex, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Acer and more. These simple yet inexpensive laptops offer the basics such as Wifi, 60Gb+ HDDs, 14-17" Screens, DVD and CD writers (burners), beginner Intel or AMD processors (Intel Celeron's or Core Solo's, AMD Sempron's or Athlon 64's), 512MB Memory and enough software to keep anyone entertained for a while. These laptops often offer the basic software such as Internet Explorer (web-surfing), Outlook Express (email), bundled digital photography software, and trial versions of Microsoft Office (word processing). For those who do not want to shell out any additional monies, there is a really great and free office compatible suite known as OpenOffice. This price range is ideal for high school/college students and home users for email and researching stuff on the web. Matter of fact, this blog has been created on an inexpensive Compaq Presario laptop, which cost me $380 after a $50 rebate, which I bought 2 years ago.
For those in the market looking for something yet a little more powerful and expect to be spending between $800 to $1200, the choices are endless. This means that the buyer will be looking to use their laptop for more intense work such as digital photo and video editing with softwares such as Adobe Photoshop and Premier which require intense processing, beginner database programs, intense spreadsheet work flow demanding music conversions and archiving and minor gaming (expect to run games in the simplest game configurations).
Laptops in this price range offer more powerful hardware such as seperate video cards, higher performing processors (Intel Core Duo's and Core 2 Duo's, AMD X2 Turions and Athlons), larger hard drives (80GB+), Minimum memory specs of 1GB, Higher resolution Screens, DVD writer, Wifi, Built-in Webcams and more. Buyers can expect laptops from brands such as those mentioned above including Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Asus and more.
For those planning to be business power users or intense gamers and multimedia authors should expect to pay a premium price for premium technology, in the range of $1300 to $2500+. These users classify themselves and power needy and require the most out of their hardware. Such users rely on their laptops at home, work/school, on the road and anywhere else in between. Size and weight will dependent on the type of laptop needed. If the laptop will be used in a more business type setting, these laptops are usually thinner and lighter than the gamer type laptop. Their screen sizes usually stay with in the 14-15" size, while gamer and authoring laptops exceed the 15" categories.
For both the business and authoring user, these laptops will pack the best hardware might include minimum specifications of: 2GB or Memory, largest and fastest hard drives,
Multimedia connectors (S-Video, HDMI, FireWire, S/PDIF), Wired or Wifi Connectivity, DVD writers, Advanced graphics card with 256MB or 512MB of its own memory or dual SLI graphics, Intel 2 Core Duo Extreme Processors, backup batteries and possibly even HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Drives. The system Operating Software (OS) will usually tend to be either Windows Vista Premium or Apple OS X. One can expect to purchase laptops in this arena with brands such as Sony, Fujitsu, HP, Dell, Alienware, Apple Macbook Pro and Lenovo.
I hope that this post will help some of the guys visiting this site. I've tried to take the grunt work out of looking and researching for a laptop. If you require more detail or plan on doing extensive research, I suggest heading off to CNET for further information. Just make sure that when you go out shopping, you know what you need and want, this way, the hounds at the retail shops don't make unnecessary decisions for you!
Thanks
