When you are choosing a laptop it is very important to make sure that you get one that suits your needs. Contrary to popular belief, you will find that all laptops are not created equal, and there is literally a notebook out there for just about any application that you can possibly imagine. Some things that you might use a laptop for are word processing, 3D modeling and animation, gaming, internet, and many other things. Below are a list of things you might use it for, and things that you will want to look for in the laptop of your dreams.
Gaming: Laptop gaming and portable gaming in general is getting very popular, and if you want to game there are a few things that you are going to need to look for. You need to make sure the laptop has plenty of RAM. 4 GB should be the desire range, though a little less won’t hurt much.
You want to make sure it has a large hard drive because games take up a lot of space. You’ll want to see what type of graphics card it has. Remember you cannot upgrade the graphics card in a laptop so you are stuck with whatever happens to be in there when you find it. Typically an integrated card will not be enough, you will want to make sure that it has a brand name card like nVidia or ATI. Remember one thing, when it comes to video cards they are numbered, The first number is the generation, the second number is the class, the last two numbers are the version. The second number is important because it tells you what the card is best used for, whether it’s good for office work, or for gaming. The higher the number, the more powerful the card. Finally you want to make sure that the laptop cools well because laptops tend to get very hot during gaming. In any case you are probably going to need to purchase a cooling pad.
Word Processing: For this application you won’t need much graphics power, but if you are a writer you will want to make sure that you have at least 2 GB of ram. The reason for this is because more RAM allows more programs to be open at once, and chances are you are going to have a lot of different documents open at once. The hard drive does not have to be huge because text documents aren’t that large, and it probably will not get very hot, so this isn’t something that you have to worry about.
3D Modeling: This is something that takes up a lot of resources, so if you are going to be doing it then you’ll want to go for the best laptop that you possibly can, maybe even one that’s better than if you were gaming. 3D model files are huge, the laptop will overheat, and you’ll want to make sure it is equipped with the best cooling pad that you can possibly get.
Internet: Surfing the internet requires a lot more resources today than it did five years ago. You’re going to need quite a bit of ram because at some point you’re going to want to instant message and maybe even open multiple web browsers. You won’t need a high capacity hard drive though, so that’s nothing to worry about.
Finding the perfect laptop is a little bit difficult, but hopefully this guide helps you on your quest!
