As the holiday season approaches, wish lists are bound to have one, two, or may be entirely compiled of, electronic gadgets. Laptops are always good sellers. For some reason, every college student throughout America feels compelled to own a laptop, as if this metal machinery is a right of passage into the world of coffee lounges, straight A’s, and sophisticated late night conversations over a chai latte. Whatever the case, check the facts before you go out and buy. That flashy Apple might not be worth the price tag, no matter what the suave young dude on the television tries to tell you. Here are a couple things worth looking at.
Mac vs. PC
The age-old debate is still raging as to whether a Mac or a PC is the best option. It’s also the question I get most frequently, and should be the first you ask yourself. But there used to be a solid black line between PCs and Macs. For some reason Macs were considered to be better at media processing and editing, and PCs for everything else. That black line has become gray and blurred.
PCs will do everything a Mac can do when it comes to media editing, and PCs have become much more stable. As I frequently like to exclaim, I’ve managed to crash the Macs here at the Independent newsroom more frequently than my own PC running Windows Vista. Go figure. So with the line blurred, it comes down to two things: style and price. Macs have always had cutting edge style, and the new solid aluminum block Apple laptops are no exception to this rule. With that style came price. Spec for spec, a Mac will come with an Apple premium over a similar laptop running a Windows operating system. For some, price is no object; for others it’s a deal breaker.
Screen size
This might be something odd to consider, but it really weighs the most (figuratively and literally) when buying a laptop. A screen size will dictate the average weight of the laptop, battery life, and can be used as a good judge of what will be found under the hood.
The 8.9″ notebooks from Acer and Asus can be almost guaranteed to be running a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom with some amount of ram and hard drive space adequate for browsing the web and word processing. In contrast, a good old 15.4″, which seems to be the new standard, will carry some dual core Intel or AMD with a minimum of two GB of RAM, or in other words, a battery life eating media monster. My advice? Portability, go 10″. Normal users, try for a 12″ Apple or a 14.1″ HP. Media users going after some gaming on the side, don’t get anything less than a 15.4″ if you plan on staring at it for more than 3 hours at a time.
Integrated graphics vs. dedicate graphics
Along with screen size, this is one of the most over looked specifications that’s hidden within a laptop. A general laptop advertisement will shout things like the memory size and hard drive size at you with big bold letters, both of which have become so cheap that any laptop you buy is guaranteed to have enough for whatever you desire. No, the real thing they should shout at you is whether it sticks to an Intel integrated graphics chip or a dedicated Nvidia or ATI chip.
An Intel integrated graphics chip will almost certainly net you more battery life. Intel makes some terrible integrated graphics for gaming, but they don’t need a lot of power. If portability is your game and gaming, well, isn’t, get an integrated Intel graphics chip. However, for those who like to do movie editing or perhaps some gaming on the side should settle for nothing less than an Nvidia or ATI chip inside of their new rig. They’ll be more power hungry than the Intel alternative, but the performance is outstanding. As for ATI or Nvidia, brand doesn’t matter; neither holds a definitive lead in performance at the moment.
Memory, hard drive space, and processor
As I touched on before, most of these aren’t worth dying over at the moment. Memory has become so cheap that anything with a 12″ or larger screen should come standard with two gigs. If it doesn’t, don’t buy it, or make them put two GB of RAM in it. Your notebooks with 8.9″ and 10″ screens should have one GB of RAM for optimum performance. Hard drives have become increasingly larger as the prices have dropped at an alarmingly fast rate. 160 GB seem to be a new standard, and larger ones are common. Good luck trying to take enough pictures to fill it up. Gamers should opt for the largest they can get, however. Lastly, the processor. Intel vs. AMD. I’ve been recommending Intel for the past two years but the new AMD chips seem to be catching up. Either should be more than enough for common computing.
I hope that helps demystify some of the gigawhats and memahoots of laptops. Online web sites such as www.newegg.com and www.tigerdirect.com frequently have better deals that can be found in stores, so they’re worth a shot if you’re shopping around. Good luck!