WHICH LAPTOP TO BUY?

Three rules for buying a laptop

1. Don't buy too much laptop

This Means Understand your requirement and buy whatever you need.

Go back four or five years, and  Rs.50,000 was considered a good price for a budget laptop. Today, that's considered very high-end, and only one company, Apple, gets away with regularly charging more than that.

So when someone says: "I'm looking for a laptop for school or College and I've only got Rs.40000 to spend," we generally tell them to ease up on the gas pedal and look at a mainstream, midsize laptop for Rs.25000 to 30000  or so as a starting point.

And it's not just underpowered plastic boxes in that price range, either. We've seen Intel Core i5 CPUs, slim, reasonably attractive bodies, and even 128GB SSD hard drives in that price range -- which is more than adequate for most users, unless you're planning on editing a lot of HD video or playing very high-end PC games.

Long story short, consumers have been buying too much laptop for years. The brief era of Rs.15000 Netbooks took them too far in the other direction, and now we've comfortably settled at a happy medium.

2. Think about traveling light

Take care of your shoulders.

The first question I have when someone asks, "What kind of laptop should I buy?" is this: How many days per week to you plan on carrying your laptop around with you?

The answer to that should determine what screen size your laptop should have, which largely defines the system size and weight. Everyday commutes suggest a lightweight 13-inch ultrabook (similar to the Macbook air now are ultraportable laptops with 11.6-inch screens.

For carrying your laptop around two or three days per week, you might be able to get away with a standard 13-inch laptop, such as a Macbook Pro. More common midsize laptops, such as the 15-inch model probably sitting on your desk right now, are really not much fun to lug around more than once a week or so.

Lastly, if you're convinced you're never going to need to take your laptop along with you, or at best very, very rarely, then a big 17-inch or larger desktop replacement is a viable option. Keep in mind that most of these big laptops can't run for very long away from a power outlet.

3. Design is king

Apealing design & style wich can suits with your personality.

If there's one thing we've learned from benchmarking and testing hundreds of laptops, it's that under the hood, a lot of these systems are awfully similar. I'd go so far as to say that, with most laptops constructed from the same pool of stock CPUs, hard drives, RAM, and video cards, it's dangerously close to being a consumer good.

That's where design comes in. If most laptops within a given class, and with similar components, are going to run similarly, it's the look and feel that's really going to push you towards one model over another.

Think of a laptop as a very visual extension of your personality. You may carry it around with you all day, or even all over the country. You send e-mails from it, store personal photos and documents, and use it to connect with people on social networks.