What to Consider When Buying a Laptop
In addition to the characteristics, there are many other parameters that are important for a quality laptop. Naturally, advertisers and sales assistants are interested in selling any expensive junk. Therefore, you need to turn off the feelings and focus on the technical characteristics and important nuances.
Lack of information is the main enemy of the buyer. After all, if the buyer is not aware of the features of the product, then he will naively listen to advertising. Of course, advertisers do not lie, but they often omit important facts and keep silent about the shortcomings.
Battery life
The most common mistake is to trust the claimed battery life. As a rule, such advertising is based on some kind of test, the conditions of which are not disclosed to us. As a result, 8 hours of battery life are equal to 4 hours. After all, the operating time directly depends on the operating conditions of the laptop. And the lack of information about the conditions for testing the battery suggests that the manufacturer is clearly cheating.
For example, the test was performed on a clean Windows with a screen brightness below 40%. In reality, this will not happen. After all, users usually have a high screen brightness, and the operating system is overgrown with various programs and utilities running in the background.
The best way to find out about battery life is to read independent reviews and testimonials.
Notebook performance
Sellers always gloss over information about laptop performance. And most users always underestimate the capabilities of inexpensive laptops. Therefore, performance is a rather murky indicator of a laptop's power.
Here, for example, some gaming laptop for 150,000 rubles. Yes, it is productive: it pulls Skyrim at ultra settings, GTA V at maximum speeds produces 60fps. And what about budget laptops with 3GB of RAM and a 5-year-old processor. Everything is not so clear here...
It all depends on your goals. Here I have a laptop with 2GB of RAM and an old Celeron B800. I need it for surfing the Internet, watching movies in HD quality and other “printed” work. It does not pull modern super cool games, but it allows you to play classics like AoE, NFS Underground 2, etc. And it doesn't hang at all (Ubuntu 14 + Gnome-flashback).
What can be concluded from the above? For the manufacturer, any laptop is productive (and this is somewhat true). But a laptop is such a thing that it is ill-suited for games. No matter how powerful a laptop is, sooner or later it will begin to suffer from overheating. Therefore, buying a laptop for cutting-edge games in most cases does not make much sense. Therefore, the best way to calculate performance is to do it comprehensively, based on reviews, reviews and technical parameters, and not on recommendations from sellers.
No need to blindly look at the processor series
About 12 years ago, everyone advertised the Pentium-4 as some kind of super processor, the best on the market. Although competitive processors in the face of Celeron were not particularly lagging behind and were cheaper. In those days, the grass was greener and people were less educated about computer hardware. And now more than a decade has passed, and consumers are still being led to advertising, as before.
This is especially true for processors from Intel.
There are a lot of processors for different tasks now, even too many. And Intel only adds fuel to the fire of sales, combining mobile and full-fledged chips into one series. What does it mean? This means that the i7 processor may actually be an economical version of the i7 for laptops and be weaker than a full-fledged i5. Those. the figure in the processor series does not have a direct relationship with power and performance.
But the processor index is already really important. After all, it is on it that you can distinguish the processor for ultrabooks from the gaming one. You just type in the index / processor number into a search engine and find all the information about it. There are many reviews on popular processors on the Internet with detailed graphs and other useful information.
Cooling system
Laptops and overheating are inextricable neighbors. It's simple: the thermal paste dries out over time, the ventilation holes become clogged with dust. Therefore, the cooling system for a laptop is almost the most priority parameter.
Therefore, pay attention to the fact that your laptop has normal ventilation holes, that there are small legs on the bottom to provide clearance with the table. Since no one will allow you to disassemble a laptop in a store, read and look at the reviews for the laptop model you want to buy. After all, the internal structure of a laptop can greatly interfere with cooling and subsequent repairs.
This is especially true for HP laptops (Hewlett Packard). With this manufacturer, most laptops are made in such a way that by removing the bottom cover, there is no way to get access to the cooling system, coolers and radiators. Usually, to replace the thermal paste, it is enough to remove the back cover, unscrew the cooler from the processor and replace the thermal paste. And in HP laptops, for this you need to completely disassemble the keyboard and so on. from the "reverse" to the desired parts simply can not be reached.
findings
Now is the golden time when most people have access to information. Now you do not need to come to the store and spend hours choosing a laptop, consulting with the seller. It is enough to read online reviews, reviews, information about the characteristics of the laptop you are interested in from the manufacturer's website. As a result, you will be armed with all the necessary information. Then buying a laptop will not be a headache and disappointment.
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