There are lots of Laptop brands when it comes to buying a laptop. Oftentimes, the multitude of brands and a plethora of specifications can overwhelm us.
But it is often important and advisable to boil things down to a few criteria and stick to them while buying a laptop. This list is our effort to help nudge our readers in the right direction when it comes to purchasing a laptop from any of the laptop brands.
You need to keep at least these 5 points in mind before investing your money in any model.
1. The Usage Criteria
First of all, you need to think about what you need a laptop for. Believe me, this step is very crucial as it will help you get specific and select the model which will work well for you. Many times when people ask us for suggestions this is one of the first questions that we ask.
What do you need it for? Generally, you can categorize your needs into heavy, medium or light tasks. For example, if you need a laptop for casual use like for reading emails, watching movies and storing stuff then it is light usage of the laptop.
If you use it regularly for your work to attend video conferences and run a bunch of software to get work done then it can be considered as medium tasks depending on the software. If you like to play top-tier games or run heavyweight software on a regular basis then you need a laptop that can handle heavy tasks.
2. Budget
Next few budgets most people often ask you what is your budget as the first question. But you have to understand that if you buy a cheap laptop but then try to use it to fit your usage criteria things might not work well and you will soon be frustrated.
Which is why once you have decided on the usage criteria decide on the budget and only give around 10-15 percent leeway. For example, if your budget is Rs 50,000 then you can choose to go up to 55k to 57k. This will restrict you from spending too much. You can try and fix your budget by doing some research online if you do not have a price point in your mind already.
3. RAM
This is one of the first technical specifications that you need to evaluate when you buy a laptop. In today’s world, you will generally be fine with 6-8 gigs of RAM. RAM basically helps your computer to run applications smoothly and helps in multi-tasking. More RAM is good but of course, if your usage criteria are point to light usage then you do not need a lot of RAM and most of that power will be wasted.
So, if you work on heavy software going above 8 can be a good choice but is not a must if it overshoots your budget. For light to medium usage 4-8 gigs is not bad. Though as a suggestion 8 gigs is good enough for most general use cases.
4. Processor
This is one of the specifications which costs a huge chunk. There are many companies which create processors for laptops. AMD and Intel are the most popular. An AMD laptop will cost less than an Intel one. But the price of the latter is quite high. If you have light usage AMD will do you no harm and you might end up saving quite a few bucks as well.
But as a general rule for medium to heavy tasks as is most prevalent in the market you can choose either i5 or i7 depending on your budget. Intel’s i5 is a very good choice and can be a good choice even if you run heavy tasks on your laptop. But if you have the budget for it we will suggest going for i7 if you really need better processing power otherwise stick with i5. It won’t disappoint.
5. Storage
Decide on a storage type. Most popularly there are two types namely HDD and SSD. The latter is quite faster than the former and costs more as well. If you do a lot of work where a huge amount of small files need to be transferred or loaded then SSD is a better choice for storage. SSD also reduces boot time. But for light to medium usage HDD is fine.
Many laptops now provide both SSD and HDD inside their laptops. For light usage no SSD is fine but if you do want it then go for 128-256 GB SSD coupled with a 512 GB or 1TB HDD. This configuration is going to suit most use cases well. Of course, if you have the budget you can go for a full 1TB SSD. But for the rest, the above-mentioned specs work well.