Things to Check when buying a Laptop. Buying a new laptop may vary depending on one’s knowledge about computers or technology. People with little understanding of computers mostly fall back on physical features such as colour, screen size, screen touch, and sound among other things.
A good laptop is not relative to its looks or appearance but rather on a number of specifications such as the Random Access Memory (RAM), CPU speed, Build Generation, display type Hard Disk (HDD) etc. We will talk about each of these specifications shortly.
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The RAM is a temporary memory bank where the computer stores data it’s currently working on. Data stored on the RAM is easily retrieved to help speed up activities on the computer. What this means is that the computer doesn’t store data of all your running applications on the traditional hard disk, but rather on the RAM. When the application is closed, the storage on the RAM is released. In short, the more RAM your computer has, the more applications you can run without your computer freezing, for normal day-to-day use, a RAM size of 8GB is more than enough when buying a computer.
CPU speed is another spec to look out for when acquiring a computer. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) acts as the brain of your computer, there are a number of CPU’s manufacturers in the computer market ranging from Intel’s i-series, AMD’s E-series and Ryzen series among others, personally, I would prefer an Intel-based CPU over the later due to a number of reasons, I will working on a post purposely for that discussion in another article. An Intel i3, i5 or i7 is pretty decent if you have the budget for one since these processors are fast and also stable when it comes to performing their jobs.
CPU generation is another factor to be taken into consideration, CPU generation simply means your CPU’s year of make. Let’s compare it to the car concept, you may compare two Toyota Camry cars but one may be a 2012 make model and the other a 2018 make model even though they are all Toyota Camry. This is the same concept about CPU generations, you can have two i3 processor computers but one will be more modern than the other simply because of the make year. This is usually referred to as the CPU’s generation. From the 6th generation to the latest one is pretty good for normal day-to-day activities.
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Conclusion:
The first question to ask when buying a laptop should be about the intent of use, and when this question is well answered, you can then start to do your research about what laptop specifications you will need.
