Choosing the right laptop

Our main aim here at Thin Laptops is to give you the best possible advice about all of the latest thin and portable laptops so you can make the best possible decision when it comes to buying one. Now obviously this site does not and cannot cover every single laptop on the market however we do our very best to include the lightest and most portable of them all. Because of that, this guide and in fact, this entire web site is targeted at those who are looking for a lighter, more portable laptop which they can take around with them with ease.

When it comes down to buying a laptop, whether its for business, home use, entertainment or gaming there are a few general guidelines which you should try to stick to. Hopefully at the end of this brief article you will have a better idea as to what you should look for when buying the ideal portable/thin laptop.

What do you need?
The very first thing you should do is start asking yourself some questions, the first one being what exactly do you need? Are you looking for a laptop which will let you do basic office work or do you want something with a bit more kick which will let you play the latest games? This choice is ery important and I would therefore suggest that you have a good, long think about it. Even if you have to take a piece of paper and write down all of the sort of things you think you will be doing on your new laptop – it may seem silly but if you buy something which cannot do what you want it to then you have wasted your money.

Under the hood
Just like when buying a car you wouldn’t hand over the money unless you knew exactly what you’re getting. The same rule applies when buying a laptop, or any type of computer really. This follows on to what your requirements are and exactly what you expect the laptop to be able to do. Based on your conclusion of what it is you want you then need to match those requirements to a suitably equipped laptop. There are plenty of technical sounding words and phrases out there, GHZ, GB, CPU, hard drive, GPU, SATA – just to name a few. But do not be put off by them – they all can be broken down into simple explanations just like I’ve done here.

GHZ
Gigahertz (GHZ or GHz) is the standard way of measuring the speed of your computers processing unit (CPU). Essentially, the higher the GHZ the faster your computer is.

GB
Gigabyte (GB) is the way in which hard drive storage is measured. Let’s break this down a little: there are about 1,000 megabytes (MB) to every gigabyte (GB) – a very useful way in which people think of how much storage they have is to work out roughly what they could store on it. Consider a typical song for example which is about 3.5 MB – this would mean for every one GB you could store about 285 songs. So the larger number of GB’s your hard drive has, the more files you can store.

GPU
The graphics processing unit (GPU) is just like a CPU (see GHZ above) but it is typically found on a graphics card and is used solely for graphics. GPU speeds vary considerably and obviously, the higher the better; but when it comes down to graphics quite an important issue is its memory, usually measured in MB (megabytes). Because games are getting so intense the amount of graphics data which needs to be stored is quite large and therefore to allow this the graphics card has its own memory. The larger the graphic cards memory the easier it will be for the GPU/CPU to handle graphics.

Memory
Just like with the hard drive (where all your files are stored) there is another type of memory. This memory is commonly known as RAM (Random Access Memory) and can be summed up in just one sentence: the more, the better. When you launch a program the program needs to store various bits of information. For example consider a text editing application, the text that you type needs to be stored somewhere before it has been saved as a file. RAM is that place!  Having more RAM means that your computer will be able to run more programs at the same time with better performance; this is also commonly known as multi-tasking.


So there you go, there are some of the major words briefly explained. Of course it would be possible to write pages and pages about each of those individual phrases as they can be quite complex, but for the purpose of this guide, we wont.

Picking your laptop
Now that the basics have been covered it’s time to pick the laptop which you are going to buy. Aswell as the performance aspect of your laptop I’m sure there are other issues on your mind. For example how heavy is the laptop, how big is its screen and most probably how wide/thick is it? These latter few are simple facts and are usually provided by the laptops manufacturer. In all of our reviews we make every attempt to include this information where possible but you should really consult the manufacturer about all of these little details. So let’s move in, it’s now time to pick your laptop. Here I have explained what you should typically look for based on the type of use your laptop will get. Simply decide which category you come under and then go from there.

Home/Office
As you will be doing fairly basic tasks you do not need any top of the range, high performance hardware (unless you really want it). Therefore to keep your costs low but to still get what you want choose a laptop which is mid range. The Dell Inspiron  1720 might be a good option for you.

Multimedia
If you like your music, movies and general computer entertainment, excluding high end games then your main priority will be a laptop with plenty of storage. It will also need to have a decent CPU speed and memory since playing multimedia content particularly HD video can be quite resource intense. The Dell Studio 17 could be an option (it features dual 320GB hard drives).

Gaming
Unfortunately the gaming experience available on a laptop isn’t quite the same as it would be on a desktop computer. This isn’t necessarily because of performance issues, although that aspect does come into it, but it is more to do with the way most games are played. A FPS (First Person Shooter) for example would be very difficult to play using a laptops track pad therefore, you may want to invest in a USB mouse to go along with your laptop. So for a gaming computer the main aspect will be graphics and memory. You need large memory to handle everything that is going on and some good quality graphics to take care of one of the core aspects of gaming.

So there you have it, a short and simple guide to choosing the right laptop for you. This may not bring you to an absolute decision as to what laptop to get but I do hope that it at least points you in the right direction.

To help get you started, here are just a few of the thin laptops which we have covered so far.