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Laptop Buying Guide

Design and build

If you want a device that can fulfil all your work and leisure needs, a laptop is really the only way to go because there’s still no virtual keyboard on the market that’s quite as effective as a proper, physical keyboard. Don’t neglect the importance of a quality keyboard and mouse, they can really make or break the user experience when using a laptop. They can vary wildly in quality, although it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that the cheaper the laptop, the less tactile and comfortable the keyboard will be. In our reviews, we describe each keyboard in detail to ensure you get the feel you’re looking for. We’ll also look at the laptops’ touchpads, which again differ greatly in how easy they are to use. Some of the best touchpads we’ve used have glass-coated touchpads that let your fingers glide gracefully over their surface. Microsoft also introduced ‘Precision’ certified touchpads, which requires manufacturers to fit touchpads that meet certain requirements around drivers and hardware. Precision touchpads noticeably perform better with a more direct translation of your swipes and gestures to your mouse cursor.

Lightness is all well and good, but if your laptop doesn’t have good battery life, the portability benefits you gain from lightness are lost by you having to carry the charger around as you desperately search for a plug on the train or in the coffee shop. Our battery benchmark represents video playback with the screen set to 170cd/m2 brightness. Your results will vary from our testing, but they at least provide a useful guide as to how laptops compare to one another as watching video is a heavily battery draining task.

Performance

When choosing a laptop, check how many cores its processor has. Generally, the more cores, the better when it comes to processors with similar clock speeds (measured in GHz). The more cores you have, the better performance you’ll get with complex tasks, such as photo and video editing, and you’ll also see a small boost in games, too.

There’s a confusing array of laptop processors on the market, but what you should always keep in mind is that laptop processors require a lot of cooling and use less power than their desktop equivalents. For that reason, you’ll have to spend a lot more on a laptop than a desktop to get like-for-like processor performance.

Some of the processors in the laptops we test also have Hyper-Threading, which creates two threads for each processor core, meaning applications can more efficiently use the cores available to them, increasing performance further.

Dedicated (discrete) graphics cards

Cheaper and smaller laptops typically forgo a dedicated graphics card, instead opting to use the on-chip graphics hardware provided by the processor. This is fine for simple tasks, but as soon as gaming, media consumption and 3D work come into play, these integrated graphics chips become overwhelmed and performance slows to a crawl. Even cheap, low power dedicated graphics cards make a big difference to performance, although they won’t be able to handle the latest games. Our favourite, best value gaming laptops typically use Nvidia’s GeForce 860M graphics card. It’s a mid-range chip but it can handle the latest games, although actual performance, of course, varies from game to game, so you’ll need to make careful graphics adjustments to each game you play to make sure you get the best performance possible. Many creative suites, such as Adobe Photoshop, can use GPU acceleration by taking advantage of the extra performance of a discrete graphics card, so that’s worth keeping in mind if you’re a creative type.

Storage

Another area where you may find yourself short-changed is storage. While most manufacturers include a high-capacity mechanical hard disk – normally 1TB – they will often only include high-performance SSDs in awkward sizes, such as 120GB. This means you will have to juggle your most used applications around on and off the SSD. If you have lots of programs or games and you want to store them all on faster solid-state storage, you’ll likely need to upgrade to a 240GB disk. Some laptops don’t come with an SSD at all, instead using hybrid hard disks that include a small amount of SSD storage. Which files are stored in this SSD cache is decided by the disk itself; the most often used files will be stored there.

If you have a lot of documents, music and movies that you want constant access to, you’ll need a hard disk to store them all on. Most Windows laptops come with at least 500GB of storage, with some also including a bonus 8GB of SSD cache storage for better file loading speeds and operating system boot times. Chromebooks have considerably less because all your files are stored offsite, in the Cloud.

Tweaking your specs

If you’re buying a laptop from a system builder, don’t be afraid to tweak the specifications of your machine to suit your own needs. To keep the headline price low, most companies will have put what we consider to be the minimum amount of RAM in their machines. For example, most laptop makers will provide units with 8GB of RAM.

^ Don’t be afraid to tweak your laptop’s specifications if you want more power, memory or storage

While this is enough for most uses, if you’re going to be working with large photo or video files you will probably need at least 16GB of RAM to ensure you have enough memory to handle several of these files at a time. Buying more RAM can be costly, though, so if you don’t want to buy the RAM up front you can always buy some more later on and install it yourself. See our guide in Shopper issue 325 on how to do this.

Screen resolution

Screen size is an important factor to consider when choosing a laptop. If you’re a multitasker who likes to run two windows side-by-side, you need a 1,920×1,080 Full HD screen at the very least. Anything less than that, such as the 1,368×768 panels we see on many cheaper limits you to using one window at a time if you don’t want to squash your programs. Ultra high-resolution laptops will have screens up to 3,840×2,160 and these are great if you want to work with multiple windows simultaneously. Windows 10’s scaling options also makes working with higher resolution screens far less painful than previous versions of Windows, too.

^ Manufacturers of cheaper laptops call 1,366×768 pixel screens “HD”, but they don’t give you enough space to work or play. 1,920×1,080 is “Full HD”

We also look at colour coverage and accuracy: the higher both of these are, the more vibrant images and videos will appear on the screen. We’d expect a minimum of 60% coverage, but the best panels manage in excess of 90%. Also, look out for contrast ratios and black levels – higher contrast ratios mean you’ll be able to pick out more details and subtle shades in your images, while lower black levels give images and text an inkier, richer look.

Guarantees and warranties

Finally, make sure you take a look at the warranty of your device because they vary wildly. If you want peace of mind, opt for a laptop that comes with multiple years “collect and return” cover, where the company will cover the costs of shipping and repair of your laptop. Return to base (RTB) warranties are less generous: they make you pay for the shipping costs. Also, check how long the parts cover on your laptop is; some companies will cover the repair but not the cost of replacing components.