Buying a Laptop With Windows Vista

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about buying a laptop, with Windows Vista. Now, Windows Vista, is Microsoft's newest operating system, and most of the laptops that you're going to see in the stores, come with this new operating system. Now, I'm going to show you some things that you need to check in your laptop. I suggest that you go to the store, and play with the laptop, look at it, see how it feels, see how responsive it is. Don't just order one off the internet, because you're not going to be happy with what you get, so let's go to the screen, and I'll show you a couple of things here to look at. Now, when you're buying a laptop that has Windows Vista on it, one of your biggest indicators that you're going to want to look at, is the processor speed of that laptop, and the amount of memory it has. Vista uses a little bit more resources than previous OS's, so click on the Start button on the computer, and then right click on Computer, and click Properties. This pulls up the hardware information, about the PC that you're looking at. As you can tell, this one has an AMD Athlon 64 Bit, Dual Core Processor, and each one of those cores in this processor, runs at 1.8 GHz. That's kind of mid range. You'll see them go up to 3.4, 3.6 now, on your extremely high end laptops. I would say that 2.0 or 2.6, is a good level for most home uses. The second one you're going to look at, is the amount of RAM that is in the computer. This one is showing 895 megabytes. Now, it actually has a gigabyte of RAM in there, but it's taken about 256 megabytes out of that gig, for the video, that's built into this laptop, so that's one thing you need to consider. The higher this number, the better. You can have up to 4 gigabytes on a 32 Bit Operating System. The 64 Bit version, goes up quite a bit higher. Now, your biggest indicator that you're going to want to look at on your Vista laptops, is this rating right here. This one has a 2.6 rating. The higher the number, the better. Click on Windows Experience Index, and it's going to show you the processor speed, the RAM, as well as Windows ratings for that. If you want to play games or anything, you want this number to be very, very high, a 2.6 won't work for you. If you just want to do business stuff, a 2.6 is fine. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just told you a little bit about buying a laptop, with Windows Vista."