A Guide to Buying Your Next Laptop

So you’re ready to buy a new laptop. But when you end up at the electronics store, you notice that there’s a huge price difference between the cheapest laptop and the most expensive one

Should you really dish out N$30 000 in comparison to a mere N$3 500? The answer lies in the technicalities.

Depending on which laptop you’re interested in buying, you might not have to spend as much as you think. Laptops, or notebooks, vary from entry-level to gaming ones. The specifications on an entry level laptop are simple: They would usually have about two gigabytes of random access memory (RAM), and a minimum of 32GB worth of storage. And if you know your laptops, you know that’s quite little.

Also, they wouldn’t be as fast as a gaming notebook, for example, because if you’re only planning to type documents and watch movies, then your processor would be slower.

The only problem with this kind of laptop is that if you fill it up and the space gets low, it won’t run as fast. But students would appreciate it. If you want something a little faster, you can always get a mid-range laptop which would cost you between N$5 000 to N$7 000.

Are you a graphic designer? Remember to check out the specifications of the type of programme you want to use, like Photoshop, and plan the kind of laptop you want to buy with this information.

And then you get the business notebooks. These laptops would normally be much thinner than expected for the sake of mobility and will include extra features specifically designed for presentations, spreadsheets, etc. These kinds of laptops also differ, but their storage space would be much bigger, ranging from 16 gigabytes worth of RAM up to 512 gigabytes. However, their processing speed would be much slower. And then we have the gaming laptops. These babies pack a mean punch, which means fantastic graphics and a whole lot of speed, because running a game such as the latest ‘Call of Duty’ would require you to have some of the best gaming technology out there. This ensures you have the best gaming experience, without any hassles. So this would mean having a huge hard drive (because games take up a lot of space), a killer keyboard and possibly around two gigabytes worth of video RAM for the processor.

That’s just the technical side.

But everyone knows that you have to have a good cooling system, so that your laptop doesn’t heat up and burn out just as you’re about to finish the last mission.

Make sure you do your research, and know what you’re going to use your laptop for. Budget your next notebook according to that and you’ll be just fine.

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