May 5, 2008
Buying A Laptop Soon? Things Are Changing
The most expensive type of laptops come in two varieties. On one end you have the large, powerful gaming laptops and on the other you have the anorexic ultra portables which are insanely priced. Both command high price tags. Gaming laptops are more practical for day to day use if you’re replacing a desktop whilst the umpc’s are the best option if you are syncing with your desktop. However the market for ultrea portables is rather small and the most popular laptop screen size is 15.4 inch. A new phenominen seems to be the budget umpc’s laptops that are 12 inch or smaller, low powered and only suitable for a few common tasks. Where the choice comes to one the gaming laptop will always win as most people who require mobility can still be portable with the average 15.4 inch size.
Intel has been controlling the laptop computer industry as long as I can remember. The centrino label has always meant the customer gets a certain standard of mobile experience but there has been some confusion regarding what centrino laptops are. Common misconceptions include thinking that just because the laptop has an intel processor that makes it a centrino laptop. A Few consumers still don’t understand that centrino is a marketing platform that implies the laptop has an intel mainboard, intel cpu and intel wireless card.
When purchasing gaming laptops the cpu, ram and graphics chip are the most important components you should consider. The cpu should be a dual core cpu like the intel core duo with a speed of over 2GHz as the minimum. Minimum requirements for RAM are 2GB if running Windows Vista but 3GB is recommended for the best performance. For a gaming laptop you need to have a dedicated video card. 256MB is the standard dedicated video memory to look for. I think an Nvidia 8600M card should be good for playing all the new games well. For hardcore gaming players get only the top of the range video cards.
Retail or the web? Where is the best place to find your gaming laptop or any laptop? Brands would prefer you go through retail but honestly there is so much choice on the web and its all much lower priced than retail. Fact is you will find it very difficult to find the same variety of high spec laptops offline and even if you do you will end up paying too much.
