Comparison Specs:
Lower End:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834101252Good:
Cheap, decent specs, will handle most everything you want to do with it.
Bad:
Slow hard drive, meh battery life
Mid Range:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834157679Good:
Better battery and hard drive, still does what you want, screen is anti glare and non glossy
Bad:
More expensive for not a huge gain, especially if you're not going to do anything intensive (gaming, video editing, etc)
Given what you want, I don't think you'd really need any more then the specs that are in these. The most important things to look at for you are the hard drive, the RAM, and the battery life.
For the hard drive my reccomendation would actually buy a slightly cheaper machine, and spend some extra money on an SSD. There getting down to $1 a gig these days, and they are soooo fast. Of course you have to sacrifice space, but most cheap laptops are 320GB anyways. If you don't want to spend more on an SSD or go through the trouble of installing it, then make sure you get a 7200 RPM drive. 5400 RPM is very usable but theres a big performance difference between the two.
For RAM, 4 GB is probably fine. Anything under that and you'll probably notice some paging when running some RAM hungry applications. You'll also want DDR3, I don't think anyone is still pushing DDR2 but you never know. Also if it says something like DDR3 1066 the bigger the 1066 number the better.
Battery life is kinda hard to tell in store. Often times they'll give you a number, but its only under the right conditions, or its if you're letting your laptop just sit there doing nothing. A couple things to look for is how big the battery is. At minimum you want a 6 cell battery (pretty standard), 8 cell is good, 12 cells are awesome. Also watch for power consuming things like bluetooth, or quad core CPUs, or whatever else they want to stick in there. If you don't need it, they'll just consume power. The other big power consumer is the wifi, , so it might be worth while to look it up and see how much of a power drain its been to other people.
I'd have to agree with Nano's suggestion to go into a local store, and at least try out the different brands they have there. A lot of the brands will reuse similar cases, so see who has a style you like, one that feels natural to type on, looks nice, isn't too heavy etc. Also when you get it, if you can immediately reinstall Windows, or linux if thats how you roll. Get rid of whatever crap they preinstall on there.
22 October 2011, 22:37
