How To Buy Laptop
. Indeed, venturing online or into an electronics store to pick a laptop can be an overwhelming experience if you're not prepared for all the choices and focused on your needs.
That's where this buying guide comes in. We'll brief you on the latest buzzwords and trends, help you decide which features matter most, and get you ready to buy the right portable for you, whether it's a super-slim ultrabook or heavy-duty desktop replacement.
The 14-Inch Dividing Line
You don't hear much about netbooks anymore, and you don't see the bare-bones minis with 10.6-inch (measured diagonally) screens, cramped keyboards, sluggish single-core processors, and a skimpy 1GB of RAM that defined the netbook category in, say, 2009. Apple's iPad and other tablets have horned in on their light-duty, Web surfing and occasional word processing territory.
But netbooks' enhanced successors are alive and well in the lower half of the ultraportable market, where 11.6-inch and 12.5-inch laptops with comfortable keyboards and relatively perky processing power such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X130e and HP Pavilion dm1-3010nr hold sway. These systems typically weigh between 3 and 3.5 pounds and often feature AMD APU (accelerated processing unit) chips that combine a CPU and GPU on the same die.
In the upper half of the ultraportable market are 12.5- and 13.3-inch laptops that usually rely on Intel Core processors. Some, like the 12.5-inch, 4.3-pound HP EliteBook 2560p $1,090.99 at 2020 PC and 13.3-inch, 3.2-pound Toshiba Portege R835-P88 $779.99 at TigerDirect, find room for onboard optical drives; some, like the 12.5-inch, 3.3-pound Lenovo ThinkPad X220 , don't. All offer full-sized keyboards and enough horsepower for desktop applications. Right now, the hottest part of the ultraportable segment falls under an Intel-trademarked term called ultrabook; more on ultrabooks in a minute.
Fourteen-inch laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400 $499.99 at CompUSA.com and Gateway ID47H07u $600.98 at CircuitCity.com are more or less the largest that get carried daily in briefcases and backpacks as opposed to mostly staying on desks. PCMag recommends 13.3- and 14-inch portables to frequent travelers and habitually refers to 15-inch and larger notebooks as desktop replacements (although jet-setters can find a few 15-inch systems, like the Sony VAIO VPC-SE23FX/S and Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (late 2011) , that are thinner and lighter than most 14-inchers).
Whether they're bargains like Wal-Mart's Acer Aspire 5349-2635 $348.98 at Walmart.com or deluxe models like the Dell XPS 15z, 15.6-inch laptops are the classic desktop alternatives. Most weigh 5 to 7 pounds, with plenty of ports, full-sized keyboards with numeric keypads, and built-in DVD or Blu-ray drives.
The barely luggable 17- and 18-inch units above them range from mainstream models for users seeking a larger view, like the Toshiba Satellite P775D-S7144 $649.97 at TigerDirect, to media centers for elite audio and video buffs, like the HP Envy 17, to monster gaming systems for hardcore players with heavy wallets, like the Alienware M18x . Such 7.5- to 12-pound systems often flaunt features such as dual hard drives, full HD (1080p or 1,920 by 1,080 resolution) displays, and the fastest mobile graphics adapters Nvidia or AMD can conjure up.
Rugged laptops like the Panasonic Toughbook CF-31 $4,929.71 at Rugged Depot and Dell Latitude E6420 XFR $5,043.00 at Dell SMB are a category in themselves, overkill (and overpriced) for business travelers but designed to shrug off astonishing abuse such as drops, vibration, rain, and extreme temperatures for vertical markets such as police forces and utility crews. They're at the far end of a spectrum of sturdiness that includes so-called business-rugged machines such as Panasonic's Toughbook F9 and HP's EliteBooks, which aren't built for torture tests but can survive the bumps and scuffs of travel better than lowest-common-denominator laptops.
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