when buying a laptop, a small buyer's guide

Working at Best Buy, many people have no idea what they're looking for as far as a laptop is concerned. Here's some basic questions and tips that may or may not help you in your search:

1) What the hell are you using it for?
You should have some idea as to what you're using it for before you come into the store. Are you into 3D gaming? If so, do not get a Mac... and do get a good video card with at least 256MB of dedicated memory for graphics. Note that this generally decreases battery life and generates more heat.

2) Where the hell are you using it?
If you're going to use it primarily at home, you may want to look at something on the bigger side, perhaps a 15.4 inch laptop or even a 17 inch. If you're taking it from class to class or otherwise carrying around a fair bit I would urge you to look for something even smaller than a 15.4, like a 14.1, 13.3, or 12.2 inch. 8.9 inch laptops are also available, though they're a bit of a small market (no pun intended) at the moment and aren't nearly as powerful as their bigger counterparts.

3) Specs-- RAM
With Windows Vista, I recommend of a minimum of 3GB of RAM. I'm saying this from personal experience. The more RAM you have the faster programs will open and respond. For Mac OSX, it's an entirely different story as it uses less RAM. For OSX I would say that starting off at even 1GB would be acceptable. This is also from experience, having used Macs a lot in high school. Should you choose to add more doing so yourself would be exponentially cheaper than getting more RAM in the laptop in the first place.

4) Specs-- Hard drive space
Most new laptops on the PC side of things come with 250GB hard drives or bigger. That's more than enough for most users. Macbooks generally start off at 140GB-160GB. You'd be hard pressed to find a new PC laptop with that small of a hard drive. Really though, if you're only using the laptop for school, some photos, and music, even 140GB should be enough for most users. And external hard drives are cheap as dirt.

5) Specs-- Processor
People often overlook this. The processor is the heart of the computer. While there wouldn't be much difference between, for example, a 1.8GhZ and 2.0 GhZ processor of the same make, there is quite a difference between processor models.

So, generally.. Intel Core 2 duo >> Amd Athlon X2 >> Pentium Dual Core.

( > is a greater than sign, for those that have forgotten basic math symbols)

You should also be careful to check model numbers. For example, with Core 2 Duos, the P series is brand new. Not many laptops have those chips. The T series preceded that. For the T series there's 2000 models, 5000 models, 7000 models, and 8000 models. The 8000 series are the newest generations of the T series. Generally each new generation boasts slightly better performance as well as less power consumption (and therefore better battery life and less heat).

6) Software
What kind of software is important to you? If you're into multimedia stuff, Macs have a great deal of excellent software preinstalled for you. If you're into PC games or PC-only programs, maybe a PC would be best for you. Particularly on the PC side-- Get some antivirus and spyware software. Please. Thanks.

7) Try it out!
No matter what you buy you'll get used to it, but try out the laptop before you buy it. Try keying a couple of sentences. Play with screen brightness. Take a look at the applications that come already installed. There's not sense in bringing something home hoping you'll get used to it when you could have taken a few minutes to shop for a laptop that you're more comfortable with.