Wife is anxious to buy a brand-new Windows laptop computer tomorrow. It’s been a long time since I kept up with the latest and greatest. What specs are important to look for?
Purpose will be posting to social media, word processing, movies…no need for something specialized around gaming.
If you only need it for social media, word processing, movies, etc. practically any modern laptop will be more than adequate. You don’t need a top of the line machine. Any new laptop will do what you want.
Think rather about the quality and size of the screen, a good keyboard, ports for connections, and the warranty. Bear in mind that you can always connect up a large external monitor or TV, and an external keyboard and mouse, if it’s mostly be going to be sitting on a desk at home.
One thing to decide on is if you want a touchscreen or not.
Both of ours have touchscreens. Mrs. FtG loves hers and it is definitely a must have. On mine I only use the touchscreen when traveling. At home I use a mouse.
YMMV.
While it should be true that a pretty basic laptop should be all that’s needed for email, web browsing, etc., a ton of sites are poorly done and just throw junk at you via javascript, media, etc. that slows a computer down if it’s not up to snuff.
Browser plugins can help but you need to be fairly knowledgeable to tweak things right.
E.g., I kill the comments sections of a lot of sites because there’s something about those parts of pages that slow things down due to perpetual script quasi-updates. And if a site is mainly all comments, look out.
[ul]
[li]Is it a good size for her use? That is, is the screen big enough for her needs, and is it small enough to carry around, does it take too much desk space?[/li][li]Is the screen good quality? She probably doesn’t need very high resolution - 1920x1080 is good and pretty common. Some screens have better brightness, color, etc. In general, IPS screens have better view angle (doesn’t fade when viewed from teh side), better color, better contrast. But some non-IPS screens are very good, some are very bad.[/li][li]Is the keyboard comfortable to type on? [/li][/ul]
In general, Intel Core series CPUs are a safe bet. Core i3 is the cheapest of the Core series, but still better than the Pentium or Celeron series.
SSD (solid state drive) has better performance and reliability than conventional hard drives, but they tend to be smaller capacity. Still, 256GB SSD should be plenty for most users. 128GB can be marginal if you store photos and music on the computer.
You definitely want Windows-10, though I doubt you’ll find anything else in stores now.
As scr4 said, I think the size is important. We have what used to be referred to as a netbook. It’s just great for a handy small laptop that we just keep in the living area. We use it mostly for surfing the net, emails and such. It’s a nice size to really use as a true ‘lap-top’. And nice and small if you want to take it on the road.
What we have is a Dell XPS 13. You can get it with a touch screen. I also like that it has a backlighted keyboard. Mouse pad of course, and very easy to just plug in a wireless mouse. Nice little unit.
eta - I would never consider getting anything but an SSD for a laptop. To easy to bump and have problems with a spinning disk.
We decided on a an HP Pavilion laptop with the following specs (important ones bolded): Intel Core i7-7500U Processor 2.7GHz
Microsoft Windows 10 Home 16GB DDR4 SDRAM 512GB Solid State Drive Intel HD Graphics 620
DVD-Writer Drive
Multi-Format Digital Media Card Reader
10/100/1000 Network
2x2 802.11ac Wireless and Bluetooth
15.6" Full HD IPS Anti-glare WLED-backlit Display
4.5 pounds
Price was $799.99. That felt like a good price but I am no expert.
We also picked up a 2 Terabyte external storage hard drive (on sale for $67.00).
She liked the backlit display as she works late in the evening.
I have an HP Envy that I like. 17" display. I hope you didn’t buy a Seagate drive. My last one crashed and I took it to tech place that was able to recover the data. He told me “Best advice: don’t buy Seagate drives. Quite often, they’re non-functional right out of the box and they are by far the ones we see the most.” He sold me a Western Digital. He also said not to buy anything larger than 2TB, as the larger drives tend to have problems.
You will likely have a very hard time finding an off-the-shelf new computer that comes with Win7 as its OS. Win8 came out in 2012, and Win10 in 2015. When I bought my current laptop from Dell in '15, the options were Win8 or Win10 – Win7 wasn’t even being offered any longer, and that was over 2 years ago.
If you’re looking to have a system custom-built for you, it’s likely more feasible to stay with Win7, but I’ll leave that to the computer experts to discuss.
If you want a happy wife, go to the Apple Store or order her a Mac laptop. For what you said she wants to be able to do with it, simply pick out a Mac laptop for your budget. They will all work fine for what she wants to do. AppleCare is absolutely the best. Even if you don’t purchase AppleCare you can bring any Apple product to one of their stores or talk to AppleCare on the phone and they will help you regardless of the problem.
It’s an OK system, but I would have gone for something with a smaller screen and lower weight. But if your wife isn’t traveling too much with it, she probably won’t mind.
Maybe not a consideration for you but all my laptops have a 360 hinge of some sort - I love being able to fold the keyboard back and use it as a stand when I watch movies in bed.
I got my wife a nice new Macbook Air once. Big mistake. She was used to Windows and didn’t like it at all, and I didn’t know enough to help her get set up. I returned it and got her an HP.
For a computer that already has Windows-7, I don’t see any problem with keeping it. But even if you can get Win-7 drivers for new hardware, I wouldn’t spend much money upgrading it. You should plan to stop using it in January 2020, when Microsoft will discontinue extended support (i.e. no more updates and patches after that).
I haven’t had any app compatibility issues with Win7->8->10 upgrades, but YMMV. Games are usually more susceptible to compatibility problems.