After my last post on the best laptop it became obvious that not everyone is comfortable with technical terminology, so in this post I’ll demystify the basic specifications of laptops into everyday language so you’ll get the gist of it.
First, let’s discuss weight. Is the laptop for home use and will it be located in one place or occasionally be moved from one room to another? If yes, how heavy it is typically won’t be a big issue for you. The heaviest laptops (usually referred to as desktop replacements) are 10-12 pounds. Now if you’re going to be carrying your laptop from home to office, through airports and train stations, or around town or campus definitely consider weight. The size of the screen (or display), and storage (or hard drive) are the features that affect weight the most. The larger they are the heavier the laptop will be. Ideally, a laptop under 6 pounds is considered light. There are ultra portable laptops under 4 pounds. They are very sleek, yet, with these laptops owners sacrifice features that they end up carrying as accessories.
Let’s discuss the size of the screen first.
Screen sizes typically range from 12-inches to 17-inches diagonally (it’s the same way standard TV screens are measured). Studies have shown that most users are comfortable with 14-inch screens (typical picture resolution is 1024 x 768, if you don’t know these numbers mean, it isn’t important unless you’re a professional photographer, video gamer, or do graphic design and the like). So, most light laptops have screens that are 12 to 14 inches. There are laptops that are 5 to 6 pounds with a 15-inch screen. The technology trend is laptops with larger screens will be lighter.
Next, let’s demystify storage and memory.
Storage (that’s the hard drive) on a laptop will hold your documents, photos, music, games, movies (or video), and applications (also called programs). Documents that contain primarily text with photos (emails, school papers, spreadsheets, newsletters, reports, etc.) don’t take up a significant amount of space. Hard drives (that’s storage) in the range of 60GB (the GB is pronounced giga-bytes and giga means billion) to 80GB are the sizes found in light laptops, which is plenty of space to store hundreds of documents, songs, photos, and some video too. If you’re going to store thousands to ten of thousands of photos, songs, documents, and movies you will need more storage, typically in the range of 120GB and up. There are laptops that have a large storage capacity that fall in the 5 to 6 pound range because the hard drive is made with materials that make it lighter. Also, removable storage, typically CDs and DVDs, require a reader (also called a drive). DVDs have a larger storage capacity than CDs. In fact, DVDs hold more than 6 times more storage than CDs. Most new laptops come with a drive that let’s you store data (your documents, music, songs, etc.) on them. This same drive will also store data on CDs. So, I recommend a laptop that writes (also called burning) DVDs and CDs.
To completely lift the fog surrounding the “techno jargon I will clarify processor and memory.
A processor, called a CPU (which stands for central processing unit), is comparable to a brain, so from here on I’ll refer to the processor as the computer’s brain, or better yet for our discussion, the laptop’s brain. And our brains have memory. Simply put, the processor is the brain, and memory is, well, memory. It should be obvious now that since women and men created computers they made them like themselves. Ok, back on topic, so when it comes to the brain, the faster it thinks and the more it remembers the more it gets done. So, the higher the brain’s speed (1.8 GHz to 2.2 GHz) and the more memory (1 GB to 2GB) it has, the more we get done. A brain’s speed (that’s the processing speed) is measured in GHz, pronounced giga hertz. Memory is measured in GB, pronounced giga bytes, just like the size of storage. The size of your storage and the amount of memory are and aren’t the same thing. Brains produce knowledge, which is usually stored in books and other types of media. Books are the same as a computer’s storage. The average person’s brain can’t know all the knowledge found in all the books in the world. Similarly, a computer’s brain (it’s processor) can’t know all the knowledge that’s in its storage. So, a processor’s memory is a smaller amount of memory that is used to know what he needs to know do the work you have requested.
If I haven’t just completely confused you, you’re probably thinking the faster the processor speed the better. Let me ask you a question, for the everyday tasks we do, is a person that thinks faster better? No, not necessarily. Well, for the basic tasks of reading email, shopping online, viewing movies, researching, and writing documents, like papers, reports, spreadsheets, minimal processing speed between 1.3 to 1.8 GHz and 1GB memory is just fine. Processing speed above 2.0 GHz and memory above 2GB are for bigger tasks like video editing, professional photo manipulation, scientific research, and high end graphic design. Bottom line, the majority of laptops will have the appropriate brain and memory power to do basic tasks.
One last comment on networking, most new laptops have wireless networking capability, which means they have an internal wireless networking card and antenna to detect available networks. As networks get faster and can handle more data (or information), new network equipment is always backward compatible, which means it works with all older networks. So, I don’t list networking information because there is no significant difference among the top of the list laptops. I’ll save a demystification of network technology for another time.
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