How to buy a laptop - laptop buying guide

               


            In this article I would like to discuss what I personally look for, when buying a laptop. I hope my ideas will be useful to you if you are planning to buy a new laptop.

Price

              First thing I would consider is the price. A laptop would cost a significant amount and we expect them to last for good two to three years. Personally I don't see a point in spending more than 600 USD for a laptop. Why? Because you can spend around 1000 USD or 2000 USD and buy a laptop with cutting edge technology with fancy specs, but that same laptop will be available for half the price within one year. And at that time there will be laptop's with more advanced tech and specs for that price. 

                        Technology change in very rapid scale. Whatever you bought today, it will become obsolete in one year. So rather spending 2000 USD and buying high end sophisticated laptop and using it for three years, you can buy 600 USD laptop each and every year with the latest technology available. 

Store

                 Selecting a store is also very important because there are stores that offer brand  new laptops for bargain price who are not directly connected with the manufacturer. The problem in buying computer from a place like this is, warranty claiming procedure is really troublesome. As they don't have direct connection with the manufacturer they have to repair the laptop at their own cost. So they try to avoid warranty claiming customers. But if you buy from authorized agent or distributor they will offer you one to one replacement in most cases. They will not try to repair your laptop board. 

                 But anyway laptops' warranty will normally last for a period of one year. Whether you bought it from an agent or store for bargain price after one year any fault you have to repair it by yourself. So if you can take the risk buying a laptop for bargain price is a deal! 

               After you decide whether to buy from authorized agent or store, go to their website and note down all the names of laptop models in your price range.

Choosing a model

                 Now take a piece of paper and write down what are you going to do with the laptop. What do you generally use computers for? Is it internet browsing? Social media? Do you use word processing and MS office other packages? Any other software that you use such as graphic designing, web development, programming, video editing etc.

               Next consider system requirements of those software and typical task that you need computer for. Now you have a general idea about system requirements of the computer that you need to buy. If you use computer only to go Facebook and some basic web browsing a basic entry level laptop is more than enough! If you are working in an I.T related profession then you have to account for hardware needs of the software that you use and possible future system requirements. 

                  Now you can narrow down the previously written computer model list based on your system requirements. Take each model and google "Model name + review" Go through those reviews you will be able to get an idea about pros and cons of each model. Please do give you attention to following things while going through the reviews.

• Battery Life
• Heating
• Driver support by the manufacturer

               I can continue to discuss about hardware specifications like ram, processor speed, hard disk, display etc. I think they should be decided by the user as per their need. Hope you get something useful from this article. Thank you for reading!