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Choosing a Laptop - Which One Is Right For Me?

There are a number of things you need to know about a laptop before buying it. Whether these things are important to you will depend on what you want to use it for - so this means that there is no absolute 'best laptop' out there.

Performance, Portability - Or a Balance of Both?

In terms of raw performance, you could go with a M2010 or M1730 laptop - these are ideal for gamers, with powerful dual graphics card configuration options and very large screens.

However, these are also quite bulky and heavy, and not ideal for someone who wants to travel a lot and only plays low-power games such as World of Warcraft - or a business user who will never play games at all. If you are in this category, then you should pay particular attention to the size and weight of the machine, as well as its battery life. It might even be worthwhile investing in a second battery if you take a lot of long-haul flights...

What Are The Minimum Specifications to Look For?

To be honest, even the cheapest laptop available today is more than adequate for general office use - word processing, surfing the Internet, simple multimedia work such as ripping CDs, watching DVDs, or basic image editing.

You'll only need to be concerned about processor performance if you play the latest video games or work with audio or video in a more serious way - such as video editing using Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, 3D image rendering or multichannel audio seqencing. If you like to run a lot of applications simultaneously, you will probably benefit from a faster dual core (such as Intel's Core 2 Duo series) processor solution.

DELL XPS M1330 - A PORTABLE MUSIC PRODUCTION POWERHOUSE

If you've been reading the Podcomplex blog you might have seen my post on Choosing A Music Laptop. In this post I mentioned that the Dell M1330 was a good candidate for a mobile studio unit, as it has a very impressive balance of power and portability (up to 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo in a tiny 2kg, 13 inch screen package). If you're thinking about getting a new laptop, this should definitely be on your wish list - and if you buy now, you can get an even better deal on this sleek notebook, with up to 300 euro off...