Tips for Buying a Windows Laptop
If you are buying a Windows laptop, do your research because you’ll be using it for the next 4 years. The laptop should look and feel good and perform well. Ask friends and family members for recommendations and then go to the store to try them out! Would you buy running shoes without trying them on first? If you’re going to be using the laptop for 4-8 hours a day, it MUST feel good to you.
Store Testing
I suggest you go to BestBuy and test out each of the Windows laptop models. These are the features I recommend testing (in order of importance):
- Keyboard - open up notepad and type a few sentences, you have to like the way the keyboard feels or you won’t enjoy using your laptop
- Screen - check out how crisp the images are and compare the amount of glare, you want the screen to be easy to read
- Quality - pick up the laptop and see how durable it is, a few of the laptops are really flimsy and it makes them feel cheap
Suggested Tech Specs
- Get a SSD. Once you get an SSD (solid state hard drive with no spinning parts), you will never want to use another laptop without one because of how fast applications start and close. It’s the single best upgrade you can get for a laptop. You’ll never have to wait for your laptop to load.
- Go with the highest resolution screen. You’ll probably be staring at the screen for long periods of time and higher resolutions are easier on the eyes so you will not feel as much eye fatigue. Movies also look amazing on higher resolution screens.
- At least 8GB of RAM. RAM is lower on the priority list unless you like to keep a million browser windows open at once. In 4 years, 8GB of RAM will still be enough to power the next version of Windows. 4GB will need to be upgraded.
Use common sense. More expensive laptops will usually perform better, but you have to weigh the cost. Do you really want to spend $200 less if the new laptop is going to be sluggish with an unnatural feeling keyboard and hard to read screen?