Laptop Buying Tips

September 13, 2008 in Mobile, Tips Leave a reply

The first questions to ask before buying a laptop is, “what will the laptop be used for and what are your accessory needs?”  I will give a couple of examples of decisions I have faced when searching for a laptop in the past.

User 1 – For a stay home mom who will be surfing, checking email, and saving a ton of digital photos (accessory via USB) Oh, and we doesn’t really like touchpad mouse option:

Answer: Look for cheap, wireless, DVD Player, and pointing stick option.  You may need to look for a huge hard drive, but maybe not.  I’ll come back to that.  You can find a good fit for this solution on auction sites or when employers cycle out and replace old machines. The last one is how I scored a $100 laptop (2 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 40G HD).  I had to add a PCMICA wireless card since the smoke’n deal did not include integrated wireless.  As for storage, you may be able to make use of a networked server/workstation shared drive to Backup and store excess photos.  This is what we do sine we have a fairly small hard drive.  This latptop at your house can be a Mac, Linux or Windows machine.

User 2 – Road warrior network security engineer running virtual machines on the laptop and doing extensive data gathering (packet captures and vulnerability assessments) in addition to email, browsing, and document creation/editing (including detailed network diagrams and data manipulation using spreadsheets and databases).

Answer: Get a fast machine, with a good amount of memory and storage space. It must be fairly light weight and it MUST run Windows XP or Server 03 (MAC is a bad choice). You must run a dual boot feature with Linux or at least have a copy of Linux running in a virtual machine that executed from your hard drive.  Other virtual machines are often useful, but they can be stored on removable media.

That leads me to my final point.  Don’t get to wrapped around the axle on hard drive space on this machine but rather go with the largest drive that is available at the fastest generally accepted speed category available on the market.  For instance, I would go with a 200GB – 7200rpm/16MB Cache over a 320GB – 5400rpm/8MB cache.  Hard drive performance (i.e., spindle and read/write speed, cache, etc) is one of the most overlooked performance features on PCs and laptops. As for additional space, you will likely need some removable media anyway.  Removable storage is dirt cheap at less than $150 per TB.  As for solid state drives, they still have some maturing to do before a serious road warrior should trust them.