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When somebody says to me, what laptop should I get?
I use a couple of key questions to narrow down what they're looking for and help them pick the right laptop for them.
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Now the first question I ask somebody is how many days per week do you feel like you're gonna be carrying this laptop around with you?
If you say, I'm taking my laptop with me five days a week to work and back on a commute, Well then you want something very thin, very small.
You take your laptop around with you maybe to work, or to the coffee shop, two or three days a week, maybe just occasionally.
Well then you can get a regular mainstream 13 inch laptop, maybe even a 14 inch one.
Now, if your laptop stays at home all the time or at your office all the time.
Maybe you just take it home once a week or very occasionally.
Then you can get a bigger screen more mid-size laptop, 15 inch, sometimes 14 inch model.
These are bigger, they are heavier, they are sometimes more powerful, they can have higher resolution screens and they can have more component options.
They are using a lot more ports that makes them more useful, but also a lot harder to carry around.
The second question I ask people is how much do you spend on your laptop?
Now, if you wanna spend $1,000, $1,200, there are a ton of fantastic choices no problem there.
Now if you wanna spend less, $800 even $500 even less, we can point you in the right direction maybe towards something like a Chrome book which is usually less expensive and less capable than a fully featured Windows laptop it's still very useful for a lot of people.
Now of course usually if you spend a lot more on a laptop it's probably gonna be good for a few more years because you've gotten More powerful components.
You have an actually body of the laptop it's hardy made of metal instead of plastic and it's stand up to abuse better.
So you'll get more years out of it before you feel like you have to replace it.
The third question I usually ask is, is there anything really special you'll need to do?
If you are using in a business environment you wanna make sure Maybe it has the biometric security that you want, like a fingerprint reader or a facial recognition camera.
One of the most exciting areas in laptops right now is in gaming laptop.
We are finally at the point where you can get pretty much the same powers you would from the very high end expensive gaming desktop and something that's much smaller much more compact a gaming laptop.
That's because the new mobile versions of GPU chips from Nvidia and AMD are just as good on the laptop version as they are the desktop version.
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Another thing to watch out for Is modern laptops sometimes don't have all the ports that maybe classic laptops had.
Today some laptops only come with one port, or two ports, and usually those are USB type C ports, which is a very useful type of port to have, but you need to have the equipment that's compatible with it, or have all the adapters and dongles that you'll need to connect your legacy stuff.
To this new tiny USB-C port.
You know what drives people the most nuts about their laptops, and they're not wrong, its battery life.
Everyone always feels like their laptop should last all day, and it very rarely does.
We're getting a lot better with battery life now and I can definitely say over the last several years, battery life in laptops has expanded.
We have laptops now that have 10 hours, 11 hours, 12 hours of battery life Don't discount battery life when you're shopping for a laptop, and most Importantly, don't believe what it says on the box when it come to battery life, because those tests are not quite as rigorous as the testing we do over here at CNET.
Listen to our battery life numbers, we'll give you a much better picture of what you can expect from your laptop.
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