How to find cheap laptop computers

By: Garry Allen


Ah yes, I want a laptop but I am not going to spend a couple of
thousand dollars for one. Well guess what you don't have to.
Laptop prices have come down dramatically over the past year
alone and they will continue to do so as technology advances.
But the trick here is to find good quality laptops that fit your
needs at the cheapest prices available today.

Now, don't get me wrong, this does not mean that they are
cheaply made. Thanks to the wonders of the technological cycle,
laptop computers are decreasing in price as their capabilities
rise. Of course, there are the latest and greatest monsters out
there that are made for gaming or high powered multimedia
applications and these babies still cost a pretty penny.

But for the average user, you can find cheap laptop computers
that provide all the power you need and then some. Every major
manufacturer out there, like Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway, and IBM
have their lower end and intermediate models that come with more
than enough speed and usability.

Now here is the key to finding the right cheap computer laptop
for you, and that is to figure out exactly what you need it
for.

Are you going to use it mainly for surfing the web or word
processing? Do you need it to work from home or mainly to save
your MP3s and digital pictures?

Ok, so now you have an idea of what you want to use your laptop
for. Now lets go out shopping and compare. You can visit any of
the top manufacturers websites or visit your local store and
find their low end or intermediate models that may suit your
needs. The three top components of a computer you want to look
for is the hard drive size, memory, and processor speeds and
take notes of each model you find on each component and
model.

The hard drive, you can consider this the brain of your
computer, this is where all your files, applications and folders
are stored. If you plan on using your computer for MP3s and
digital pictures your hard drive should be large since these
files are usually very large. I personally would look at 80gb as
minimum.

Next would be the memory, memory can be considered the thought
processes of your computer. As a minimum I would look at 512mb
but if you plan on using your laptop for gaming of course this
should be much larger, in the area of 1 to 2gb. Now memory is
used whenever a program or application is running. So the more
memory you have the faster your computer can process the
program.

And finally your processor, now your processor is just that it
processes all the inner workings of how each program runs. The
faster the processor is, the faster the program instructions are
processed. Again if your looking for a laptop for gaming uses
you want your processor with high speeds 2ghz or more. For other
uses you can go less.

Other parts of the computer to also consider are the ports
involved that can connect your computer to your digital camera
or your mp3 player for example. You also want to check that your
laptop has wireless and broadband connectivity. Many cheap
computer laptops today already come with this but you want to
make sure or you will have to pay additional, for example, a
wireless card to install in your laptop to have this
capability.

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