Imagine a scenario, you are standing in an electronic store, looking at various laptops. One of the sales representative comes to you and you ask to show a laptop which should be good for your business or leisure. The sales representative asks you your budget and takes you to a section where bunch of laptops are present. If you know about laptops you can easily check the specs and select one. But what if you don’t know anything about laptops and still want to buy one?
Often, we ask our buddy or a relative to go with them while buying a laptop. We think that the other person knows better than us. It might be, that the other person knows more about laptops than you do, but you should know the basic about laptops, so that you are confident enough to buy your own without tagging anyone else.
The basic thing about laptops is that it is a miniaturize version of a PC. But it is in no way less powerful than a desktop. It has less weight, doesn’t require wire all the time, easy to carry and easy to use. However, there are some cons to it as well, like you can’t customize at your own will, repairing is expensive, heating issue and a bit more expensive than the desktops.
Having said the pros and the cons, lets discuss whats under the hood. In every laptop there is a processor, mother board, RAM, hard drive, battery, graphics and few other parts.
Motherboard
According to Wiki – A motherboard is the main printed circuit board found in general purpose microcomputers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals.
Like human being, it is the body of the machine. If you buy a better quality mother board, it is more likely that all the other parts will work in harmony.
Processor
The processor is the brain of the laptop. The better the processor is the better it will perform. If you are likely to do heavy work in your laptop, I would suggest you go for the latest processor model. Please search the series of processor in google or other search engines for better information. There are generations in Processor, first gen being the old version and currently 8th Gen being the latest one.
RAM
RAM or the Random access memory, is a device in the computer where temp data is stored for processing. RAM is used in the CPU to store information that needs to be used very quickly, but it does not store any information. The unit of RAM is MHz. The better the MHz is the better it should perform. Another thing to consider is the size of the RAM, i.e. how much GB the RAM is.
Do check with the vendor if high-end RAM will be supportive to your Motherboard before buying.
Hard Drive
In technical term it is an electro-mechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store data. If you have a large data to store, do go for a larger Hard Drive (like 1 TB or 2 TB). For gaming, multimedia and work, generally large storage is required.
In general, there are two kinds of Hard drive, HDD and SSD. HDD have larger disk space but they are heavy, while SSD are a bit faster but expensive. So depending upon your requirement do go for any of them.
Battery
Battery plays an important part in your Laptop. The better the battery backup is the more wire free you can stay. So, check the battery backup that the company claims, generally it is much less in practical, but do check it before buying. There are some laptop brands which provide fast charge, so keep an eye to that as well.
Graphics
Why do you need graphics? This is one question everyone, who are not gamer or works with multimedia, asks. To be honest, you don’t need graphics for work (other than some fields where visual or creative designs are involved). But you have to consider, even for watching movies with great viewing experience, a good graphics does help a little.
Display
There are many types of displays available now, but most commonly it can be classified into HD and Full HD display. When you look at the laptop screen, you can’t find much differences, only when you are watching movies or playing games, you can find difference. If you want a laptop for work, you can go for normal display, but if for something else, you can go for full HD display.
These are few of the basic things to know about laptops. If you know these, hopefully you will be able to spot the difference when you go for shopping. Hope these simple info makes your laptop buying experience worthwhile.
parijanam 