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What are your computer woes? Is it so ancient that you can only run Windows 3.1? What about the age old excuse of, “Its just acting slow.”? How about failing hardware? Do you need to upgrade because your computer can not run the latest software? Or is it that your cup-holder is broken again? Any way it goes, you want a new computer, and you want to go mobile like everyone else. This strange world of mobile computers may intimidate you at first but you will soon find that there are few differences in buying a laptop or a desktop. The following are the top 10 question you should ask yourself before researching and buying your new laptop:

10. Your budget is probably the biggest consideration, and can be the deciding factor on what extra options, if any, you will get. After you decide on a budget then look at what laptops can fit your needs and price around. A little phrase to consider is that spending a little extra now will save you a LOT of headaches later. With today’s technology prices putting down a $2000 budget will make you extremely happy and you will probably have money left over. You will also find that the price of a laptop is very close to being the same as a desktop with the same specs when you include an lcd monitor.

9. What are your needs out of a laptop computer? Everybody likes to surf the net, check e-mail, do word processing, and at least the occasional song and picture, and pretty much all new computers can do all that. Some just do it faster than others.

One extra thing you will want to consider is video games. Today’s games can take a serious toll on computers resources in order to perform well. You will need a little extra depending on the game you want. The easiest thing to do is look at the box the game came in, and read the “recommended” requirements. Then base your computer from that. A little faster wouldn’t hurt either.

Video is another heavy option. If you like to store a lot of movies and TV shows you downloaded then you will need a bigger hard drive and a better video card. Everybody has said that they will just put it on disk after they watch it or download it to save space, but you know as well as I do that you don’t want a billion disks to sift through and don’t want to wait on load times. I’ll explore more on storage later.

Do you travel a lot, or in school? This will affect many choices in options with the laptop. In other words: How mobile do you want to be? That brings me to number eight:

8. Size. Wow, there are a lot of different sizes out there! How do you choose? First, if you want to be really mobile then you would probably prefer a smaller screen. This will affect the overall size and weight of the laptop. The screen size will also affect the battery life you will get out of one charge. Usually a 14.1” screen or smaller is consider small. Or, if you are looking for a desktop replacement that you can occasionally take around the house or even less out of the house, then you might consider a bigger screen. These screens put out 17” of video love and most come with those lovely number-pads to the right of the keyboard. A 17” screen compared to a 14.1” screen is obviously heavier and use up more battery life, but you will be plugged in to an outlet almost all the time and what is a pound or two extra. A happy medium is a 15” or a 15.4” if you want a widescreen.

Thickness will also affect the weight of your laptop. Getting an ultra thin laptop is cool. Just remember that with all that breathing room gone your cool laptop can get hot fast.

7. Some people don’t care about what brand they get, and consider that a computer is a computer. While that may be truer with desktops, laptops are a little more crucial about what brand you get. If your happy and satisfied with computer by a certain company, by all means stay with that company, and remove all doubt in your mind that if your computer messes up it wasn’t because you got a different brand. FYI: all brands of all computers have problems, some brands just have more.

This part is a little more difficult to write without being biased, but I will attempt. Take my opinion for what you will, but I have worked with computers for many years and even sold computers at a certain technology store.

That being said, picking a brand of laptop is like picking a brand of automobile. No matter what brand of car you get, you can always get a fast engine under the hood. Some brands of cars are just better built and perform longer because of the quality. Most people would consider an average quality brand of car as being Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, Toyota, etc… A better quality car you would probably be Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, etc…Comparatively, average brand of laptop would be Gateway, Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, e-Machines, and the better side of laptops is Toshiba, Sony, IBM-Lenovo, and Alienware. But remember the better quality comes at a price.

6. The first step in choosing speed is the processor. There are a few factors to consider in a processor. First is, do I want Intel or AMD? At this point in technology Intel has the best processor for a laptop called the Core 2 Duo. It is a little more pricy but from what rumor mills say, I expect it to go down by the end of the year. There is absolutely nothing wrong with an AMD processor, they will soon come out with a competing processor.

Next you will want to consider raw speed. This is usually measured in Gigahertz. (abbreviated GHz) The bigger the number, the faster the processor is. Also, bus speed is very important in speed of a computer. This is probably one of the biggest factors and the most overlooked. Bus speed is how fast the computer’s components can communicate with each other. A lower bus speed will cause a bottleneck in the flow of information and will cause your computer slow down. A low bus speed is the leading cause of slow computers. The easiest way to not get a slow bus speed is choosing the correct model of processor. In the Intel brand a Celeron processor has the lower bus speed and respectively for AMD the Sempron is slower. If you are on a strict budget, you will probably consider going to one of those slower processor models. But, if you must get anything extra, bus speed is the first to consider.

Recently another factor has appeared, Dual-Core. Dual-Core means that the processor has two processing lines, and that means it can now process two things simultaneously, and double the power of the processor without taking up extra power from the battery. Single core processors are being phased out so they are a bit cheaper.

5. The second factor in speed is memory. Memory is a temporary place for your computer to store commonly used data from the hard drive. A lack in memory can severely affect the computer’s speed. Memory is measured in Megabytes (MB) and Gigabytes (GB). As a unit of measure I will inform you that 1 GB = 1000 MB. Today’s recommended amount of memory is at least 1 GB. This is especially recommended if you want to upgrade your Windows from XP to Vista when it comes out. You can get 512 MB and work with Windows XP easily, but never get a computer with only 256 MB unless you plan on upgrading the memory.

4. The hard drive is another speed factor of your computer. How does the storage device affect the speed of the computer? The hard drive is essentially the slowest component in your computer. This is especially apparent in laptops. The hard drive being slow is the whole reason for memory in the first place.

Each hard drive has disks inside that spin at a certain speed. And how fast they spin determines how fast they can access information. Essentially, if you speed up the hard drive, you have sped up the whole computer. There are only a few speeds of hard drives to remember, and hard drive speed is measured in Rotations per Minute (rpm). The speeds are 4200rpm, 5400rpm, 7200rpm, and 10,000rpm. I am not aware of a laptop that has the 10,000rpm hard drive, and the 7200rpm is rare and expensive in laptops. The rpm of the drive is the second thing to consider in speed if your budget allows.

Size of the hard drive does not affect speed much but does play an important part in how many programs, songs, videos, etc you can store on the computer. Like memory the hard drive size is measured in Gigabytes (GB). You may ask, “How do I determine how much space I need?” There is no formula to determine an exact number. You will just have to do a little predicting. Keep in mind that the average song is 4MB, the average picture on a 6 mega pixel camera takes up 4MB, and the average movie is 3 to 4 GB. That is about 250 songs or pictures per GB. If you plan on storing either of these on your computer you will have to allocate that much space on the hard drive, and when your drive is full you will have to delete something to put something else on. You can always burn your media to a CD or DVD to free up space. But, as I said earlier, “Do you really want to go through that?” The average person will not fill up 80GB. Also, if you need extra space you could buy an external hard drive.

3. Do you want to be able to watch a DVD on your laptop, or do you want to go as far as to be able to backup your DVDs to another disk in case they scratched? Most all laptops come with at least a CD writer\DVD reader drive standard. If you want to be able to copy DVDs or make your own, you will have to opt for DVD writer drive.

The drives speeds are measured in “X” otherwise known as times. In other words 1X is real time, (the speed as if you were watching the DVD or listening to the CD.) and 2X is twice as fast as real time. Currently the maximum speed for burning a DVD is 16X and a CD is 52X.

2. The warranty is a very important feature and can be the most expensive option to get. Every laptop should come with 1 year warranty from the manufacturer covering only defective equipment. Every major manufacturer and even the retail stores offer extra protection ranging from extending the manufacturer’s warranty to covering any accidents you may have. Since most defective equipment shows itself after the first year, extending the basic warranty is highly recommended. If you want to cover wear and tear or are clumsy you might want to consider getting the complete coverage warranty, so in case you drop the laptop and the screen cracks it will be fixed free of charge. These repairs can cost more than the laptop. If that is the case, most warranties will just give you a brand new laptop. (Free upgrade!) Before getting any extended warranty review the terms and conditions so you know what they cover and what you will be paying for that coverage. Remember, Insurance is us;ess until you need it. Then it is priceless!

1. Connections can be time and money saver if you have the right ports. USB devices are multiplying rapidly. Printers, mice, flash drives, hard drives, digital cameras, and many other things come with the USB interface. So, make sure you have plenty of USB ports so you don’t have to buy an USB hub.

If you want to hook your laptop to a TV so you can watch a movie or slide show contained on your hard drive you will want an s-video port. If you have a digital camcorder, look to see if it uses USB or Firewire as the computer interface.

For your internet purposes look at the network and modem ports. The modem is a normal looking phone jack. The modem will allow you to use dial-up service. If you have high speed internet you will need a network port. It looks like a wide phone jack. Also becoming standard built in is a wireless network card. This will allow you to log on to a wireless network (when you are in range and if you have one). Home, work, coffee shops, college campuses, and hotels are the most common places to find a wireless network.

from: Aldiss Blog

I had a little Acer 10.1″ netbook for about 6 months. Loved the portability and long battery life, but the small screen and keyboard were killing me, so I sold it. After doing a lot of research, I settled on this as a replacement. This little beauty is SWEET. The keyboard is springy and responsive, it looks SO classy with the brushed silver exterior, photos look amazing on its screen, and it’s still small and light enough to drop in a backpack. I considered buying an external DVD, but instead, I just shared the DVD tray on my desktop computer and loaded necessary software (Office 2007 Pro and Photoshop Elements 7) that way. Saved a few $$ by not buying that EDVD.

I was a little concerned about the uber-shiny and slippery touch pad, but I’ve had no trouble with it. I took the advice of someone who posted a review and used the little button above the touch pad to disable it before putting the computer to sleep and I haven’t experienced any of the unexpected freezing some other reviews highlight. As others have said, it’s a fingerprint magnet, but, hey…it’s a touch pad.

The left side of the palm rest is a little warmer than the right, but it’s not uncomfortable.

The web-cam powers right up and the images it produces are great. The built-in mic works fine for sitting a comfy distance away.

I charged it up, unplugged it, cranked up the screen brightness, and proceeded to uninstall HP bloatware, install Windows Security Essentials, Office, and PSE 7, watched some CBS videos, watched an hour-long TV show streamed from my desktop PC that I’d recorded via Win Media Center, and still it took over 5 hours to get the battery down to 10%. It took about 3.5 hours to charge it fully again (seemed a little long, but I wasn’t in any hurry) and I’m in the process of draining it for the second time. It ran internet videos very smoothly and just had a couple of hiccups on the video coming over my wireless from my desktop. I built a fairly complex, multi-layer image in Photoshop Elements and it was smooth and fast.

It’s only been a day, but I think I’m going to be VERY glad I made the switch to this machine. I have a couple of HDMI cables on order and can’t wait to try connecting it my HDTV and stream Netflix.

My only negative is the sticker-fest all over the palm rests. They look like they’d peel off easily, but I tried removing one andit was stuck down so tightly I was afraid I’d be left with just a sticky mess behind, so I left the stickers there.

Happy day! Hope this review pushed you over the edge…

Rating: 5 / 5

I had a little Acer 10.1″ netbook for about 6 months. Loved the portability and long battery life, but the small screen and keyboard were killing me, so I sold it. After doing a lot of research, I settled on this as a replacement. This little beauty is SWEET. The keyboard is springy and responsive, it looks SO classy with the brushed silver exterior, photos look amazing on its screen, and it’s still small and light enough to drop in a backpack. I considered buying an external DVD, but instead, I just shared the DVD tray on my desktop computer and loaded necessary software (Office 2007 Pro and Photoshop Elements 7) that way. Saved a few $$ by not buying that EDVD.

I was a little concerned about the uber-shiny and slippery touch pad, but I’ve had no trouble with it. I took the advice of someone who posted a review and used the little button above the touch pad to disable it before putting the computer to sleep and I haven’t experienced any of the unexpected freezing some other reviews highlight. As others have said, it’s a fingerprint magnet, but, hey…it’s a touch pad.

The left side of the palm rest is a little warmer than the right, but it’s not uncomfortable.

The web-cam powers right up and the images it produces are great. The built-in mic works fine for sitting a comfy distance away.

I charged it up, unplugged it, cranked up the screen brightness, and proceeded to uninstall HP bloatware, install Windows Security Essentials, Office, and PSE 7, watched some CBS videos, watched an hour-long TV show streamed from my desktop PC that I’d recorded via Win Media Center, and still it took over 5 hours to get the battery down to 10%. It took about 3.5 hours to charge it fully again (seemed a little long, but I wasn’t in any hurry) and I’m in the process of draining it for the second time. It ran internet videos very smoothly and just had a couple of hiccups on the video coming over my wireless from my desktop. I built a fairly complex, multi-layer image in Photoshop Elements and it was smooth and fast.

It’s only been a day, but I think I’m going to be VERY glad I made the switch to this machine. I have a couple of HDMI cables on order and can’t wait to try connecting it my HDTV and stream Netflix.

My only negative is the sticker-fest all over the palm rests. They look like they’d peel off easily, but I tried removing one andit was stuck down so tightly I was afraid I’d be left with just a sticky mess behind, so I left the stickers there.

Happy day! Hope this review pushed you over the edge…

Rating: 5 / 5

If the words “Dell” and “AMD” excite you then lean in, we've got something for you. You won't find it on Dell's US site just yet, but Dell Singapore is showing off its first laptop to feature AMD's new Nile-class of processors. The Inspiron M301z starts at $999 (that's about $715 of the US green stuff) with a 1.3GHz dual-core Athlon II Neo K325 processor (optional 1.5GHz Neo K625), 2GB (up to 4GB supported) of 1,333MHz DDR3 memory and a 320GB hard disk spinning at 7,200RPM, ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4225 integrated graphics, a glossy 13.3-inch WLED display pushing 1,366×768 pixels, and a 6-cell 44WHr battery for up to 5-hours of promised life. It's available for purchase now in Singapore and likely elsewhere just as soon as the sun begins to warm the western world.

[Thanks, Qayser]