After working with a laptop I purchased two and a half years ago that has broken time and time again I have learned a thing or two about purchasing laptops which has saved me a lot of sleepless nights talking to tech support (because I replaced it with a better laptop!) This guide will give you the mindset you need to be in when you are looking for a laptop that you are planning to keep.

Situations:

• You are an avid gamer that wants to purchase a “portable gaming machine”
• You travel and want something to check e-mail and allow you to post to your blog.
• You are a college student trying to find a good machine for school.

Think Thin
When I first went out looking for a laptop the first thing I did was go on a power trip and try to find a laptop that could play all of the latest games at the time. Bad choice. I learned the hard way through the weight of the laptop that having a 10 pound laptop was a really bad decision.

Not only was this bad for my back (when I carried it around) but my laptop was actually too heavy to sustain its own weight! The down and dirty of this meant that if I moved it enough it would break no matter how careful I was. Carrying it anywhere was very tiring as well, so I couldn’t be nearly as portable as I am with my small 5 pounder laptop I have now.

Therefore, you should always consider weight to be one of the most important factors. To you gamers out there, they make laptops which can handle games but a small desktop station may be a better bet than a laptop form of a gaming station (more on this later). Size is incredibly important for a few other reasons as well:

• Keyboard Size - I found that keyboards are harder to type on when using the really small laptops. Our hands just aren’t made to be THAT precise. So I recommend think thin, think small, but not ultra-small.
• Screen Resolution - My large laptop has 1920×1200 resolution which is my personal favorite because I like a lot of screen real estate — most people aren’t comfortable with such a large screen resolution but be sure that your new laptop can at least handle 1280×768.
• Price - Large laptops and extra small laptops are generally far more expensive than a normally priced laptop.

So the trick is to think thin. If you want a gaming laptop, spend the extra cash and find one that is more compact or invest in a smaller desktop machine that can handle gaming better than a laptop could. Generally 14″ screen laptops are going to have the highest possible batterylife because the screen is small enough to not take up a lot of power and the laptop is large enough to carry a larger battery.

Stay tuned as I continue this series tomorrow with another post on batterylife and the decision between power and batterylife.

God Bless,
-Daniel Kolansky