What to look for in a laptop

I have many friends ask me what to look for in  a laptop? How should the ram be configured? How should power settings be configured?

Considerations I've looked into when buying a student laptop:
Do the tech people seem responsive. The Book "Is This Thing On? A Computer Handbook for Late Bloomers, Technophobes, and the Kicking and Screaming by Abby Stokes Gives some excellent advice." call up tech support and see how many IVR or computer menu systems are involved. See how long it takes them to answer. Once you got a hold of someone say that you are considering buying a laptop. Ask them if they know of any promotions which are going on. If you are not at a large company to make warehouse like negations then check out the website http://www.techbargains.com Should online shopping make you feel uncomfortable and you would like to see the machine so you can see if the screen resolution looks right, Google has shopping.google.com

Some of my favorite places to recommend that people buy electronics are through Sam's Club and Costco. In the old days Costco offered a generous 1 year service warranty no questions asked. People took advantage of this system and some would get a laptop every single year through the program. They shortened the warranty to a couple months which people install and try things out on their computer but not to the point that they are essentially getting free computers every year.

Two of the things that companies try to impress on you are how much RAM is included. While it is important to know how much RAM is the maximum RAM in the device, RAM is upgradeable from places such as Newegg, Amazon, Tigerdirect. The best way to find out if your computer would take more RAM is to run the utility at the crucial website. Make sure that the big RAM is for big computers (desktops). Little SODIMM is for laptops. At this time there has been an entry by DDR4 SODIMM RAM. I'm looking forward to seeing the prices fall, which inevitably they would. Perhaps the most important piece of a computer is the processor. This determines what capacities the computer has for installing things. ARM processors are good and cheap, however with the falling prices of AMD A series and Intel celeron N. Remember there is a tradeoff between energy consumption meaning power consumed by making applications work with this processor, having a long battery life in balance with performance and how responsive the applications would be.

Some laptops have easy to access removable battery containers. This is highly recommended for two reasons. Beside the obvious ability to add another perhaps larger supply of power and switching the two as necessary, there is the benefit of being able to do a built in reset. This could be done by removing the detachable battery and the power cord all at once. Then try to turn on the computer without a power source. This clears some settings which make the computer more sensitive to events such as corruption through lightening

When a battery goes bad, do not remove it, it has a good chance of overheating the laptop. The battery acts as a transistor.

The most important aspect of a computer is how fast is the hard drive, first of all the newer operating system Windows 10 has file compression turned on so it automatically compresses the files on a drive. Once upon a time it was needed to defragment a disk every week. This has changed in a world of solid state drives of SSD. The common advice is that you should not defragment a SSD because it would wear out the sectors so they can no longer store data and would  have to reallocate the data. There are 3 different types of harddrives the first two depending on spinning rotation speeds or RPM
(rotations per minute). These are the 54000 and the 72000 and although there is a 100000 it is not often used with laptops because of heat related limitations. The other type of hard drive is SSD and the best bet is to get them separately as they do add considerable cost to machine. The best place is to go to tomshardware.com and search for a hard drive you feel comfortable with pricewise for what you want to do. Remember if you have an AMD or Intel processor the next limiting factor is the speed of the hard drive. A gigabyte is not a gigabyte. On a music CD an hours worth of CD can take the entire drive but only take up a few megabytes on a MP3 player. The reason for this is that the MP3 player has a processor able to decompress in real time. This makes the CD sampling or dropping packets of information unnecessary to get the CD player information quick enough that it does a song. Someone asked me if they can put a 72000 hard drive in a machine that came with a 54000 RPM. There are a couple reasons why this is not advised, the first being the obvious additional friction that the faster harddrive would generate. The second being the varying speed of the SATA connections themselves. We are up to SATA 3 at the time of this writing.

Another bit of advice, http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1349-ram-how-dual-channel-works-vs-single-channel recounts of a survey which found a little bit of fast ram was faster than lots of slow ram. This makes sense while playing around with Microsoft Sysinternals RAMMap and VMRAMMap on an Exchange 2010 which needed constant work due to a misconfiguration. The client found that while shutting down the virtualized server guest that the machine would act fast and have a low memory footprint. Then as it was used more and more it used more memory. This makes sense from a practical standpoint. The night before getting ready for work, it is useful to set out a few items to make them easier to grab. The small amount of RAM forces the system to be well organized. However excessive RAM provided an opportunity for a dumpload of items and in RAM it is worse because of pointer nodes. This means that there are either duplicate items in RAM or a succession of pointer nodes.