The Coburn Blog

I get this question asked alot of me, so I thought I would answer this in a blog post.  The question is:  What is the best laptop to get?I’m going to break away from the Mac Vs PC debate for a second, for those who have to go Windows for their job or some other reason like that, to tell you guys about the bottom line when it comes to laptops.  If your going with a Windows PC model, the only thing that matters is one thing..  RAM capacity.

As we all know, Windows is very bad at being slow, sluggish, and all that, so I get alot of questions regarding which laptop to go with.  In my opinion, whichever model you choose to purchase, comes down to one thing.  RAM.  Nothing else in a laptop matters.

Now I know people want something thats fast, lightweight, and all that, but you have to remember one thing about that.  Any computer you get is going to be fast,  from the old 1.0 GHZ to the latest 4.0 GHZ there all going to be fast,  so CPU speed don’t make any difference, thats the biggest misconception I see alot of people make.  Second, it don’t matter if you go with hard plastic or titanium, or a 13.3 or 17 inch, there all going to be fairly lightweight, anywhere from 6lbs to 9 lbs, and unless your a little girl carrying a laptop around to school, the difference between 6 and 9 lbs is hardly trivial.  I mean, unless you drop your laptop on the ground frequently, which you shouldn’t anyway, the casing isn’t going ot make any difference.

For College students, who have eagle eyes, rather they get a 13.3 inch screen or a 17 inch screen isn’t going to be a big deal at all.  Now for me a 17 inch screen would be ideal, but thats only because I’m blind and could see the bigger screen better, but for most people that’s not a big factor, but just remember,  the smaller screen you get, the smaller items are going to be on the screen,  so if your vision isn’t quite 20/20, you may want to go for a larger screen for instance. Yeah you may sacrifice an extra pound or two, but like I said,  there all less then 9 lbs even the larger 17 inch titanium models, so who cares,  just work out some more if 3 lbs makes that much of a difference to yah. hehe.  just joking.

As for Hard drive space, most modern laptops come with way more then the average person actually uses.  Unless your a big time music and video fan, I wouldn’t worry about hard drive space either.  Any 5400 rpm drive is going to do you just fine, which all modern laptops come with nowadays.   Of course, you could always go with the 7200 rpm barricuda drives,  but the extra battery power they use up isn’t worth the speed benefits in my opinion,  just because the speed isn’t that much faster, just a couple miliseconds faster is all you’d notice if you’d benchmark the two, and it just cuts your battery life between charges down in half.

The biggest hardware component thats going to make, or break, any laptop, will be RAM capacity.  Not necessarily how much RAM is in the machine, but how much RAM the laptop is capible of holding, thats the key.   Most Dell, Gateway, and Compaq laptops I never recommend, because they only hold a maximum of  2GB.    whats the problem with that you ask??  simple, laptops also share video RAM with system RAM, so if your running Vista with  2GB of RAM,  minus the 256 mb  the video is using,  your already down to 1.7 GB before you even turn the machine on.    My Compaq Presario V5 has 2GB max, and its a load of crap to put XP or Vista on it either one, because I only get 1.37 GB total system RAM out of it.  In XP thats fine, not the best but it will work. In Vista,  the Operating System itself requires 1GB of RAM,  so basically I only have 370 mb free to run applications with.  That sucks because your constantly caching from the hard drive to run applications, so its like really really slow,  slower then my old 486 sx PC was..    all because there’s not enough RAM in the system to run Vista,  and really the performance wouldn’t be much better in XP either,  for it takes almost 2 GB total to run XP anymore.

Anyway my point is, any model you go with,  find one that has a maximum capacity of more then 2 GB of RAM.   There’s only ONE major manufacturer of laptops that I can think of off the top of my head, that supports more then 2 GB of system RAM,  and thats HP..    Now I know what your thinking,  isn’t HP and Compaq the same company now?  Yes thats technically true,  but HP’s laptops have much better hardware components inside them then Compaq’s do.  In fact, I’ve been very impressed with the HP line of laptops lately.

This lady who drives the kabs bus here in town. She just purchased an HP Pavilion. The laptop she bought came with 4 GB of RAM already installed.    I was like…..oh man I am soo jealous of you!  hehehe.  She said she bought it at Sam’s Club for like $550.  Came with 4 GB of RAM, a 160 gig HD, a webcam, and some other things.   Now she wasn’t too happy with HP / Compaq’s technical support,  which agree with her does suck. I mean, half the time your talking to someone from another country who can’t speak English very well. hehe,  but there all like that now I figure.  The most important is RAM capacity,  because if you have at least 3 GB of RAM in your laptop,  maybe even 4,  your system will fly, regardless of the CPU or hard drive capacity.   so really if you want to speed up your laptop, don’t get another laptop, save your money and just add in more RAM, as much as it will hold,  but if it doesn’t hold more then 2 GB of RAM,  then I’d get an HP for sure, because those 4 GB models, those are really cool!!  I saw one at Walmart the other day, it came with 3 GB but you could put up to 4 GB in it. for like $600 I think it was, that was just awesome!  I’d trade up my Compaq for that model anyday, even though all the other hardware compoents in mine, and that one, were completely identical.  I’d even take a slower CPU speed laptop with 4 GB RAM in it, over this one anyday.