Oluwatobi ODUKOYA talks of computers.

HELP! I DON'T KNOW WHICH LAPTOP TO BUY.    

 Today is Thursday, 26th July 2013 and I had this sweet lady come by my office; she wanted to buy a laptop, having seen different models and types from friends, she was all confused about which laptop type to buy. I had to do a lot of lecturing before she could come up with a choice of laptop, so I decided to drop this piece; it will help readers to conclude on the best type of laptop to buy considering the budget and the computer’s intended use.

   First I’ll like to point out that a laptop is mostly an indoor gadget, i.e. it is not like the phone that we get to show off with, and it doesn’t get much attention from people. So, a good laptop isn’t the finest, it’s not the slimmest, it’s not the most expensive nor the largest or smallest, it is simply one that serves its purpose for you and of course it should be quite presentable. I’m going to tell u about this old school uncle of mine that has an I-phone 5 and a blackberry Q10 sent to him by his sons abroad and you’ll probably not be surprised that all he does with these phones is make calls, he rarely texts. You will agree with me that this man should be using a Nokia torchlight phone; for God sake, he is underusing those phones; Apple and Blackberry should probably get him sued for underuse and abuse of their creation.
    Now to the business, when you want to buy a laptop, 2 major things should be considered:

• The range of amount you have to spend on a new laptop,
• What you are going to use the laptop for, 

I did not list RAM size and HARD DRIVE size as you might have expected because these components are easily upgradeable, they can be changed to higher ones easily if u consider them insufficient, but I should tell you that I advise a minimum of 2g ram, hard drive can be of any size since you can easily get a back- up external hard drive.

 After noting these two things, you will need to visit a laptop sales market, and get a list of laptops within your price range, having a list of these laptops, you should then begin to eliminate or select some laptops in your list according to the guidelines below:

• If you are not going to do any large graphics work like serious gaming, video editing etc; eliminate all AMD laptops. This is because AMD laptops tend to get easily hot and this makes them less durable if not probably maintained. If your budget range is low, you may probably have only AMD laptops on your list because they tend to be relatively cheaper, so u may have to just go for one of them.

• If you are going to be doing large graphic work like serious gaming, video editing etc; select all AMD laptops and all INTEL laptops with ATI or NVIDIA graphic processor. You can also select other Intel models if and only if you can make sure that they have enough graphics memory that you need (like some Intel Acer laptops have high graphics memory). AMD laptops are good for graphics, just that you may have to cope with its hotness and maintain its cooling system on a regular basis. Intel laptops with ATI or NVIDIA laptops are better; they get less hot and they tend to produce very good graphics too, but they are relatively more costly.

• If you are a typical lady such that all you want to do with your laptop is watch films, word editing, and other small processes, I will advise that you go for mini laptops if u don’t mind the small screen size, don’t worry it can play the almighty Zuma, Chicken Invaders and the likes; of course it has a WEBCAM! You can also get an external cd-player if you have to play cds or dvds.

• If you are going to be doing a lot of simulations like mat-lab, chemcad and the likes with your computer, you should want to go for laptops with multi-core processors, AMD have dual-core and quad-core processors, INTEL have dual-core( Intel Pentium) Intel core i3, Intel core i5, Intel core i7 in increasing order of processing power.

• If you are into Maps, or if the size of image that your laptop screen must cover per time must be much, then you will have to consider buying a laptop with larger screen size (15”, 17” etc.), but these laptops tends to be very heavy and not so comfortable to move about.

    I guess this is all I can cover for now, I should have helped you narrow down your list to a few laptop models, asking questions and comparing will lead you to a laptop model that is just good for you.
I must emphasize that it is so unnecessary to buy a laptop that has features you wont use; I mean: why buy a 140,000 Naira laptop just to watch films and edit word, when a 60,000 Naira one will do the job perfectly?.
    If you have any questions, do well to leave it in the comment section. Thank you for reading.