What to look for in a laptop

As always with laptops the important factors are usually:
1. Size
2. Weight
3. Price
4. Heat
5. Comfort
6. Performance
7. Screen resolution
8. Battery life

If he's looking for heavy business use and occasional gaming then I'd think he wants at least a 15" laptop, maybe 17" if he does a lot of spreadsheets.

Screen resolution varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. You can find high end 15" laptops with up to 1920x1080 resolution.

I'd suggest hitting up Newegg and browsing through their selections. I'd say a decent laptop that can do most games will be around the $1000 to $1500 mark. It won't do "zomg Crysis at 2560x1600" but it'll be enough for most games at relatively high quality.

You should find out what are the most important factors for him from the above list and then find a laptop based on that. Keeping in mind that the beefier the processor/GPU the most heat it's going to produce and the most power it's going to suck down.

What I think he needs is a laptop with at least: 4Gb of ram, a Dualcore with 2ghz, one of these graphic cards or better ( Hd 5470, Hd4650, Gt330).
Further what is most anoying in a laptop is when it produces a lot of heat and the fan creates way to much noise, also you should buy a laptop that is supposed to last up to 4 h so you can use it 2,5h (Values given by manufacturer are max values where your screen and other things are on 30%)
I have a 17,3" laptop and now I would advise everyone to buy something like 15,6, 17,3 is not very comfortable to carry around.

My sister's friend wants a laptop and asked me about them since I'm our family's designated computer geek. Unfortunately for him I only build gratuitous desktops.

So, assuming heavy business use and some gaming, what should he look for in a laptop? Or what should I advise him to avoid? He said price is no concern, although he probably didn't research it.

He prefers HP or Sony, although I don't know why, or how important that is.

Battery life is basically something to look at (how many lion cells does it have relative to others in its market segment), though any kind of 'gaming laptop' is not going to have great battery life.

As a programmer a real numpad is pretty high on the priority list.

A high resolution display is also pretty high on my list due to working in IDE's and doing graphics work as well. This gets progressively more 'interesting' as the smaller the laptop the more likely it has a lower resolution display.

I ended up with an MSI GX660R, though I did upgrade the RAM from 6 to 12GB.

Something with a Sandy Bridge CPU would probably be the thing to look for now.



... And the fan on my MSI hardly ever goes over a quiet purr, though there is a button on the unit to max out the fan and its about 10-12x louder when it gets spun up to full speed.

1. Operating System
2. Ram
3. CPU
4. Screen Size
5. Video Card
6. Ports
7. Track pad
8. Battery Life
9. Integrated Bluetooth
10. Integrated wireless

Have a good day!

1) Mobility - Is he able to take it to his work place easily?
2) Connectivity - Is he able to connect to the internet or even 3g if he needs to?
3) Ergonomic value - Is he able to use it with ease?
4) Power - Does it do what he wants done?

Get those right and you can't go wrong

Anything with a cool color, aslong as it aint no Alienware.

joking aside, stay away from alien ware, sure they build decent laptops, they also upsale for they're name. If I were to get a laptop, I'd know I'm not going to get a top of the line gaming machine, and would focus more on battery life. Everyone is going to boast that intels are great for gaming, but they're also power hungry. Stick to AMD/ATI for your hardware.

As long as you're not using an integrated gpu, you should be fine with most games, and like I said laptops should not be view as gaming rigs, so going with a less powerful gpu, is better for battery life.

If they're really all about gaming, tell him to get a desktop, otherwise deal with it, laptops will never compare if you want to use it for more than an hour without recharging.