What To Look For When Buying A Laptop?

Bagger

You need to consider your budget and how long you intend to use it for. If, for example, your budget is £300, then you will have to look at a low end laptop. If you intend to keep the laptop for about 5 years, then you should look at spending about £500.

Things to look for:

RAM - 2Gb is about right.
CPU - If Intel, look at a Core 2 Duo. Avoid the Pentium M or Celeron processor. The reason is that these are old processors and may not last for the next 5 years.
DVD - You may want a DVD rewriter.
Card readers - You may want a built in card reader for SD cards etc.
Wireless - If possible, upgrade to an 802.11N Wi Fi card.
Hard Drive - most hard drives are large these days. Also, if you need extra storage, an external hard drive is easy to install. Look for a hard drive with a speed of 7200rpm.

Other things to consider may include in-built video camera, warranty etc. As for Operating System, do look at Vista. In a couple of years time, Vista should be very stable and will be the norm. You do not want to spend more money upgrading. Alternatively, see if you can get Windows XP now with upgrade disks to Vista. I know Dell do this for some of their laptops. I bought my 11 year old daughter a laptop with Vista and chose the Classic menus. She is using the laptop as normal and did not notice the difference. Vista is relatively stable at present. However, the service pack due in Q1 2008 should make it better.

As I've said, it all depends upon your budget and how long to intend to keep the machine.

Bagger

BillScarab

Vista is fine now in my experience. However if you are going to run Vista I would recommend getting Home Premium not Basic and do get 2Gb of RAM as it is memory hungry. Nowadays with the price of memory I don't think it's worth getting the bare minimum.