How to Choose a Laptop

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to choose a laptop. There's a lot of things you have to consider when you're purchasing a laptop. The number one is probably going to be size. Are you going to want to carry this laptop around with you. If so, you're not going to want an extremely massive, you know, nineteen, twenty inch laptop. You're going to want probably one with fifteen to the seventeens, and they even have some that are way on down there now like seven inch screens that are that are ultra portable. The second thing you want to consider is what operating system is on it. Windows XP is is, or Windows Vista is the one that's usually goin' on home laptops for people now, but also very popular is Macintosh laptops, and a lot of software works for them, as well as Vista, and both of those are very good choices. So, you need to consider; I would say you go to the store and play with both of em' a little bit, and see which one you feel most comfortable with. Now, one thing to look at here this is your screen size on your laptop, and I suggest when you're buying a laptop you go to the store and play with em', because you can look on the Internet all day long, but if you actually don't sit down and get the feel of one you're going to make a bad decision. Screen size is a big deal right here, because this screen size is going to determine the entire size of the laptop itself. Another thing to consider is is it a media laptop? Can you play DVD's in it? Can you play CD's? Does it have a CD burner? Those are all fairly standard, but this one actual here is meant for media and it has a little row of buttons across the top that can control the DVD player. Now, when you're in the store and you're looking at laptops it's a good idea to kind of get into the hardware, and check out what it has, so I'm going to show you how to check your processor speed, and your memory here. So, click on the start button on the laptop, and then right click on computer, and go to properties. That's going to pull up the properties screen about your computer. And what you want to look at more than anything is the processor. This has an AMD 64 dual core, and each of those cores runs at 1.8 gigahertz. Memorywise, I have 895 megabytes of memory in this PC. Now, Vista has a rating. This one has a rating of 2.6 which is kind of on the low side. It goes up to I think 5 is the maximum, so you'll want a 5 or 10, so you'll want to look at that rating also. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just told you a little bit about what to choose in a laptop."