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Basics, Buying a New Computer, Computers, Hardware, Online Shopping Tips

How to Buy a Laptop – The rest of the numbers and specs

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This is part three of our series on buying a new laptop. We’ve already covered CPU comparisons as well as the meaning of the primary specifications that you’d see in a laptop ad. Today we’re going to look at the secondary specs to give you some idea of what they mean. The big number, the price, is only one of the things you should look at. A low price does not always represent good value. Sometimes, spending just a bit more money can get you a lot more computing power. Here are the links to the previous posts on this topic:

How to Buy a Laptop – Comparing CPUs

How to Buy a Laptop – What do all these numbers mean? 

Take a look at this photo which compares three different laptops:

Photo of Buying a Laptop - The other numbers 1
Something is missing in the middle one. Can you find it?

 

These specs apply to the laptops that we compared in our last two posts. The things to look at on this comparison, and almost all sites have a comparison setup like this, are these:

Native Screen Resolution – This is where a cheap screen will show up. All three have good resolution but if one had lower numbers, the display would not be as crisp as one with higher numbers.

LED Backlit Display – You should ONLY look at laptops with LED screens. If the spec says ‘LCD’, move on to something else (that includes big screen HD TVs as well). LED screens mean longer battery life, plain and simple, as well as cooler temps and substantially lower power usage. There is no difference in how the screen looks to you so only buy a laptop that has an LED display.

Touchscreen – With Windows 8 and its crazy new features, plus the preponderance of tablets, touchscreen is something that is offered on laptops these days, usually at much higher cost. We can’t see these sense of this so we’d advise to stick to a mouse/touchpad arrangement.

Processor Cores – Four cores is better than two cores, two cores is better than one. Once you’ve checked out the CPUs by reading our previous post, you’ll know all about these specs anyway. Higher speed often means higher power consumption. Unless you’re editing video or recording sound frequently, you don’t need anything extreme here.

RAM Slots – The left and right laptops have one open RAM slot. This means that you could add more RAM later on. The middle laptop has both slots full but it has three times the memory of the other two. If you sacrifice some RAM for a lower price, check to see if there is an open slot so you can add more later on.

Optical Drive –  We think we’re experts, right? When we saw that the middle laptop, the one with all of the great specs, DID NOT have an optical drive, we were shocked. An optical drive, in case you don’t know, is a CD/DVD unit. This laptop, even with all of its delicious specs, does not have one. Make sure you check that the laptop you want has one of these. You can always add an external drive for $20 to $30 but that removes the portability factor. Can you see why you have to make a shopping list AND check the specs before you buy a new laptop?

(Please note that Chromebooks and ‘netbooks’ do not come with an optical drive. No use looking for one that does, NONE of them do. Chromebooks and netbooks are different beasts completely. We’ll do a post on these hybrids later on.)

Built-in Card Reader – Virtually every laptop has a card reader like this. This makes taking the photos from your other mobile devices (phones/cameras) much simpler. Take out the SD/micro SD  card and pop it into your laptop. No wires and no fuss.

Here are more specs to check:

Photo of Buying a Laptop - The other numbers 2
Blah, blah, blah…right? No, there are a couple of important specs here.

We won’t explain all of these since most of them don’t mean much to the average buyer. Here are the ones that we think you should look for:

Bluetooth – This addition would make using a Bluetooth earpiece for conversations on Skype very smooth. It’s not something we would look for but the middle laptop has ‘integrated Bluetooth’. If you use it, you need it. If not, it’s not something we’d add to our shopping list.

Approximate Battery Life/Battery- Number of Cells/Battery Capacity – The hours of use are fairly irrelevant since we don’t know the criteria used but all three of these have decent times shown. The second part, the number of cells, is more important. If you see a good price, make sure they aren’t scrimping on the battery. Dell has recently supplied two cell batteries with their low end laptops. Two cells? That’s not only cheap, it’s just about criminal since very few people look at this spec. The middle spec reads ‘4’ cells, right? The spec that comes next explains why there are only 4, not 6. The middle laptop is sold with a battery that’s over 50% bigger, as far as mAh (milli-amp hours) is concerned. That’s a hefty rating, believe us.

Pre-loaded Operating System – All three have Windows 8, of course. The two on the right use Windows 8 64-Bit. What does that mean to you? Basically, it means the two on the right are better laptops. They have a better CPU that can handle the load that comes with the 64-bit version of Windows. The laptop on the left is under-powered and can only manage the 32-bit version. But, and this is important, the laptop on the far right has only 2 Gigs of RAM. Remember that. Windows 64-bit needs/eats/consumes RAM and, even though it’s offered with 2 Gigs on the laptop on the right, don’t expect it to set any speed records. Your computing will be slow and you’ll be very frustrated while you wait for things to happen. As we said earlier, 4 gigs is a minimum these days, 6 or 8 is what you should look for.

We’re done! Now you’re armed with enough knowledge to make an educated decision when you’re in the market for a new laptop. If we’ve missed something, let us know. If you have questions about anything on this (or any other) topic, make a comment below and we’ll answer as quickly as we can. We love comments, questions, suggestions from our readers.

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Basics, Buying a New Computer, Computers, Online Shopping Tips

How to Buy a Laptop – What do all these numbers mean?

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This is part two in our series on buying a new laptop. We talked about the brains of the computer last time, the CPU, showing you how to compare one CPU to another. If you missed it, check that post out here: How to Buy a Laptop – Comparing CPUs . This time we’re going to take a look at some of the other numbers that you might see in an ad for laptop computers.

Here’s a typical ad:

Photo of Buying a Laptop 1
If you’re looking for a laptop, you’ll be seeing lots of ads like this.

 

We’ll do some comparisons in our next post but let’s take a look at some basic information that the little blurb beside each computer contains.

 

1. Screen size – all three of these laptops are 15″, actually 15’6″ measured diagonally across the screen, not including the plastic bezel around it. In our opinion, this size is the minimum for an everyday working computer. By this we mean a laptop that can be used for just about anything; writing, photo editing, video processing, etc. If all you do on a computer is email and Facebook, you can get by with something smaller but, keep this in mind, smaller doesn’t mean cheaper. The best prices by far are in this size category, barring special deals at certain times of the year.

2. Brand Name – While you may not recognize all the names you see, laptops made by the large vendors (Lenovo, Acer, HP/Compaq, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Sony) are all quite dependable and offer at least a year’s warranty, sometimes with product pickup and repair. Additionally, you can always purchase warranties that extend the basic one year period to two or three years. We don’t recommend this but you might like the security that this offers.

3. Color – Believe it or not, this actually makes a difference to some buyers. Sometimes there is a premium to be paid for a cool, modern color. You’re on your own here. Black, silver, pink or blue is fine with us, just as long as it doesn’t cost more.

4. CPU – As we showed you last time, you can quickly compare CPUs. In this case, all three are made by AMD. It stands to reason that the laptop for $349 has a faster processor but that’s not always the case. It’s better to check out the speed, cache, etc. using the technique we showed you before.

5. HDD – This is storage capacity, sometimes mistakenly called ‘memory’. In computer terms, memory is temporary, storage is, more or less, permanent.  When you save something ‘to your hard drive’, it is permanent, at least until you delete it. The numbers in the ad, 320 GB or 750 GB in the ad shown above, translate to 320 gigabytes or 750 gigabytes of storage. To put these numbers into perspective, a movie that you can download using a torrent is usually 700-1200 megabytes. An mp3 music file might average 5 megabytes, sometimes more if the quality is better. The larger hard drive in the ad would be able to hold about 500 movies or 100,000 mp3s, allowing room for the Windows operating system and other files. For the average user, 320 GB is just fine but if you can get 500 GB or more for a little bit higher price, it’s something to consider. In the ad shown, the 750 GB hard disk drive is well worth the extra money.

6. RAM – Officially, RAM is memory. How much memory do these laptops have? The cheaper ones have only 2 GB of RAM while the $349 laptop has 6 GB. How does this relate to anything? Today’s norm is 4 GB of RAM. This number gives you relatively fast computing with some additional room for extra tasks. 2 GB these days is ridiculous. Yes, you can always add more RAM but that just costs extra money. You’d be better to take the 6 GB at $349 and be done with it. As to how RAM affects your daily computing, think of it this way: more RAM lets your computers think about more things at the same time. If you are writing something in Word, listening to tunes on iTunes and browsing Facebook in your browser, the paltry 2 GB of RAM would slow your computer down to a crawl. With 6 GB, you wouldn’t be taxing your laptop at all, it would be just as fast as ever.

7. OS – Just about every computer you see for sale runs Windows 8. (Macs, of course, run the Apple OS.) At this point, you don’t know which version of Windows 8 comes with each laptop so this information is fairly useless. If one of these listed Windows 7 as its OS, we’d say buy it immediately! Fewer and fewer Windows 7 laptops are around these days but we do consider it a superior operating system. More on this in our next post.

These are the basics, hopefully helping you narrow down your search for a new laptop. Next time we’ll delve further into some of the obscure numbers and terms that you’ll see in the ads. Stay tuned!

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Basics, Computers, Hard Drives, Hardware, Online Shopping Tips

How to Buy a Laptop – Comparing CPUs

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In the last few months, we’ve purchased two laptops. Because of our interest in this area, the process was relatively stress-free and, believe it or not, quite fun. For you, this whole strange world of confusing numbers and specifications might be very scary indeed. Over the next few posts we’re going to outline some of the differences you should look for when buying a new laptop. By the time we’re through, we think you will feel a lot more confident when shopping online. Why online? Our experience tells us that the customer service reps in the various stores do not know what they’re talking about. The presence of a salesperson just adds more stress, something you don’t need when you’re spending a few hundred dollars of your hard-earned cash. Shopping online can be done at your leisure, any time of the day or night.

The Basics

Laptops are the portable computers that have a screen that folds down onto the keyboard. That may seem obvious but you will see many other mobile computing devices, tablets for instance. Tablets don’t have a separate keyboard as standard equipment and the simple act of inputting words is much less convenient. For these posts, laptops are our concern. We don’t consider tablets to be real computers, they’re more of a toy, at least as far as getting work done.

Laptop Categories

Right now, laptops come in a few different forms. Not only are there different sizes, there are at least two different types you might see. The difference between these two types has to do with their storage capacity. Google has recently come out with what they call a Chromebook. HP, Samsung and some other manufacturers make these Chromebooks. They differ from all other laptops in two ways. First, they don’t run a standard OS (Operating System). Instead, they use the Google OS, as opposed to Windows or the Apple OS or Linux. Second, the Chromebooks have very small storage capacity. Google figures that most of us are online all the time anyway, so they’ve come up with the idea of storing everything online, in the Cloud, instead of on a hard drive. We just bought a Chromebook but these posts deal with laptops with conventional hard drives. We’ll do a separate post on Chromebooks at a later date.

Laptop Sizes

Small laptops, often called ‘netbooks’, can be as small as ten inches. This is the measurement of the screen, measured diagonally. Netbooks are fun, very portable but difficult to type on and, usually, very slow. Beyond that the sizes range from thirteen inches up to about eighteen inches. If there is a standard size, one that matches portability with usability,  you would likely want to look for a laptop that has a 15.6″ screen. This size usually has a full keyboard, often with a number pad on the right, and large keys, not the ‘chiclet’ kind that you see on a netbook.

Comparing CPUs

We’ll get into some of the other laptop specs later but we’re going to demystify the CPU today. What’s a CPU? Basically, it’s the brain of any computer. If you personify any computing device, the brain controls how fast that device thinks. Remember those ‘Intel Inside’ ads from a few years ago? These ads were telling you that the brain inside that computer was made by Intel. At that time there were other CPU manufacturers but these days there are two main makers, AMD and Intel.

Here’s what we see when we check out laptops on a popular website:

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 1
Two Lenovo laptops, different specs and different CPUs.

Pricing and other specs aside, these two laptops have different CPUs. The top one contains an Intel Pentium 2020M while the lower one has an AMD E1 1200. How on earth is anyone supposed to keep track of these numbers or know what they mean? Most of this is deliberate on the manufacturer’s side. Even if you do manage to remember one type of CPU, the names are always changing. Here’s how you can compare CPU specs very quickly.

1. Go to google.com

2. In the search slot, type in the first CPU name, e.g. Intel Pentium 2020M, then type in ‘vs. then the name of the second CPU, AMD E1 1200 in this case. This is how it should look:

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 2
No caps needed, just letters and numbers.

3. Take the first link that comes up, cpuboss.com:

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 3
Click the link to find out which CPU is best for you.

We’re not sure how they do it but once you type in two CPU descriptions, a page is created that compares one to the other.

4. This is the result of this comparison:

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 5
We thought the more expensive CPU would be best and we were right.

5. For the more discerning searchers, here is how CPUBoss came up with their recommendation:

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 6
Various test results.

5. OK so CPUBoss thinks the Intel CPU is best. This is based on the results of the various tests they put the chips through. You might find it interesting to scroll down the page, at least in this example, to see one interesting difference between the two CPUs.

Photo of Comparing Laptop CPUs 7
Not a whole lot of reason to choose the AMD…except one.

In our example, the Intel is the better choice but the AMD CPU will use about half the energy of the Intel chip. It also has a built-in graphics processor, uses less power but, unfortunately, runs a bit hotter than its competitor. Going back to the original ad, ignoring the other specs again, we see the better CPU is also $120.00 more. Here is where you have to weigh the extra cost against the better performance. The Intel doesn’t seem to be worth the extra money, at least in this case. If other criteria were similar, we’d choose the AMD but in this case, we wouldn’t buy either one. The less expensive laptop doesn’t have enough RAM, only 2 gigs instead of our required minimum of 4, plus both are overpriced.

This exercise shows you how to compare CPUs, taking obscure combinations of numbers and letters and turning them into something a whole lot more meaningful and comparable.

Next, we’re on to the other specs in this same ad. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Online Shopping Tips, Online Sopping Tips

Android Tablets – How to compare them

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We’re in the market for an Android tablet. Right now, we’ve got most of the bases covered with Apple, Blackberry tablets and one Android mobile phone but we think an Android tablet would be a good test base for future posts. Just this week we returned a Samsung Galaxy 7″ tablet which froze several times, finally locking up completely on us. NCIX, our favorite shopping spot, took it back promptly. Thanks guys! While we were in the store, we saw the ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7. Here’s how we figured out that it is the best ASUS tablet for us.

1. We headed over to the ASUS (A-soose) site. We’re in Canada but you can find your local ASUS site from this link (it may default to your local ASUS site anyway): ASUS Canada

2. Up at the top of the page, look for Products and rest your mouse over the word. This menu comes down:

Photo of ASUS Shopping 1
We’re comparing tablets so we chose ‘All’.

3. After choosing All on the menu above, we narrowed down our selections to only 7″ models. Look on the left to check the size you want:

Photo of ASUS Shopping 2
Three sizes are available but we want 7″ for portability.

4. Right now, there are four models available. How can we know which one is best for us? ASUS, as well as many other shopping sites, lets us compare them. We checked all four.

Photo of ASUS Shopping 3
Choose the models you want to compare.

5. Once you have made your selection, look up on the top for the words Compare List. Ours had the number 4 beside it since we’d chosen 4 models to compare. This menu pops down and you want to select ‘Compare Now’.

Photo of ASUS Shopping 4
Compare Now.

6. Don’t be intimidated by the next page. First, it’s a long one, needing some scrolling. Second, it’s full of what looks like gobbledy-guck. Let’s go through some of the important lines, just so you know what we looked for. This might help you make your selection, here on the ASUS site but also when you’re comparing other hardware.

Photo of ASUS Shopping 5
Operating system, memory and storage are the main ones here.

You can see that there are different versions of the Android OS (operating system). All are current main version (Jelly Bean) but there are three different levels. Next, check out the display. The latest model, the Nexus 7 (2013) has the best screen resolution (1920×1200) while the old Nexus 7 and the HD7 have a slightly lower resolution. CPU doesn’t really matter to us but it’s something to consider in other hardware. Next, we looked at memory. Here, memory is NOT storage, it is RAM (Random Access Memory), basically how many things the tablet can think of at one time.

Lastly, we looked at storage. All have 16 GB of room but the Nexus 7 (2013) is available in a 32 G model.

7. More details here, just scroll down:

Photo of ASUS Shopping 6
Camera and Interface are the important items.

As long as the tablet has wireless, that’s fine with us. Bluetooth? Very handy since we just picked up a Bluetooth keyboard. Most tablets come with a camera. The Nexus 7 (2013) and the HD 7 each come with two cameras. One faces you so you can use it as a webcam for video chats while the other, the 5 MP (mega pixel) faces away from you. This allows you to take decent quality photos.

Interface, the things that go in and out of your tablet, is next. We’re happily surprised to find that the HD7, the one we have decided to purchase, has a Micro-SD slot which takes up to a 32 GB card. That makes total storage capacity for it up to 48 GB. Bonus!

We’re not too concerned about the sensors but we do want GPS support. Where is it?

8. Here it is:

Photo of ASUS Shopping 7
Two models support GPS, including the HD 7.

 

We’d already decided that the HD 7 is the model we wanted but this was confirmed when we compared the standard features to the price. Right now, the Nexus 7 (2013) is about $250.00. The HD7, complete with almost all of the features of the Nexus 7 plus the available 32 GB Micro SD slot, is only $159.00. We won’t miss the few features that the HD 7 is missing, certainly not for $90.00 more.

We’ve given you an outline of what to look for when shopping, at least for Android tablets. We’ve been shopping online since 1996, believe it or not. Let’s say that we know how to get a deal. We hope we can help you do the same.

Thanks for reading!