The best laptops for everyday use
Buying a new laptop is surely one of the more daunting tech purchases you can make. There’s an intimidating number of products out there on the market, and they do a dizzying amount of things. How do you find the best laptop for your needs in this haystack of microchips?
The first step to answering that question is to work out what those needs actually are – and the truth is that for most of us, the answer is basic tasks like sending emails, browsing the internet, and watching films or TV shows. In which case, there's good news and bad: almost all new units on the market will be up to doing what you need them to – but that means it can be difficult to discern whether the money you pay is a worthwhile investment. Should you get cheap and cheerful, or dear and desirable?
“If you’re only going to use it to browse the internet, watch on-demand services like Netflix, and perform basic tasks in programmes like Word, then you’ll be fine with a laptop of under £300," says Phil Elford, Head of Technology at Argos. “For a good all-rounder to use for work applications like spreadsheets and presentations, I would recommend devices above £400. Gaming and premium products start at around £700.
"As with most things in life," he adds, "the more you spend the better experience and quality you will get."
But how much does that experience, that quality, matter? £300 might buy you a laptop that streams Netflix just fine – but would you be better off shelling out extra for the additional options that inevitably ratchet up the price, like a fancy HD screen, good speakers, or 360 degree hinges? And are the £300 models so ill-designed that you find them uncomfortable to type on after 20 minutes in a cafe, or too heavy to carry in your bag to work?
Those are the kind of questions that I kept in mind while reviewing the laptops for this article. I wanted to find the best laptop for the casual user – people who want a go-to machine that does the basics well and is designed for frequent use, without necessarily offering the whizz-bang computing power required by gamers or film editors or software designers.
I found that technical specs were less important in the decision making process than you might think. Once upon a time, anyone looking for a new computer would spend ages comparing processing speeds and RAM. However, laptops these days have really good processors (most use Intel, some use new kid-on-the-block AMD). I've included a detailed explanation on the merits of different processors at the bottom of this article – but honestly, if you're looking for an everyday laptop, whatever you choose will be up to the job. The only time I struggled during testing was when I had loads of tabs open on an Intel Core i3 (the entry level model).
You also won't need to worry too much about operating system. There are basically three choices here. Windows, MacOS, and ChromeOS. All are very good operating systems which have slightly different ways of doing things. They're all intuitive and they've been user tested to within an inch of their lives, so whichever you choose, you'll pick it up very quickly and it'll soon feel natural. Windows is perhaps a bit more technical, MacOS is a bit more user-friendly, ChromeOS has a bit less support for software developers, but it's really not going to make a lot of difference to the layperson.
And finally storage. Storage has completely changed in the past few years. While you might be used to laptops having 500GB hard-drives, these days you won't find many with more than 256GB. Most manufacturers would prefer you to use either an external hard-drive or cloud storage. I've explained a bit more about this down in the FAQs at the bottom of this article, but don't be too surprised if you see a laptop with less storage than you'd expect.
So, without further ado, here were my picks when I set out to find the best laptop for everyday use, starting with my favourite...
1. Google Pixelbook
Why we like it: A premium product, easy to use, and morphs into a tablet in a blink of an eye
From £1,199, Argos (The model tested for this article was the £999 edition)
Screen size: 12.3 inch
Weight: 1.1kg
Battery life: 10 hours
Operating system: Chrome OS
Storage space: 128GB-512GB
Chromebooks have been around for a while now: small, lightweight laptops that use Google's operating system and prioritise convenience over everything else. You won't find programmes like Word or Excel here; they've been replaced by Google's own suite of applications, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Gmail, which habitually save files to the cloud rather than your hard drive. The quietly revolutionary idea is that you can pick up your work wherever you are, whatever device you're using. No more facepalming when you realise you've left that work presentation on your laptop at home.
For a while, Google essentially franchised ChromeOS out to hardware manufacturers like HP, so Chromebooks were always made by other companies. The Pixelbook is Google's first attempt to go it alone, allowing the creators of the OS to show exactly how their system should be handled.
The overarching idea is for the Pixelbook to rival the Apple Macbook, and for my money, it's a huge success. It's blessedly light and portable, easy to use, gorgeous to behold, and endowed with the fantastic ability to morph into a tablet at the drop of a hat.
Google have designed a winner here. The Pixelbook comes in a sleek aluminium silver with a white glass top to break up the design. It looks – and feels – premium. Inside, you’ve got a very flat keyboard which is really comfortable to type on and never feels cramped, despite its small size. I found it easy to work on all day long (although I did grow frustrated of the tiny lag between pressing the CAPS LOCK key and caps lock actually activating, which resulted in this sort of thing: aLl of my sentences ended up looking like i Couldn’t type properly. Still, that's probably my fault for not using the shift key like a normal person.)
With the screen closed, the whole thing is just 20.6mm thin, so it's ideal for sliding into a backpack or briefcase. The price you pay for the slimness is the lack of ports, with just two USB-C included and no HDMI to share your screen with a television.
Its skinny size is matched by the lightness of the device – just slightly more than a bag of sugar. I took the Pixelbook to and from work every day and barely noticed it in my bag.
The Pixelbook also has 360 degree hinges, and probably makes the most convincing case for them of any of the laptops I tested. Spin the screen all the way around and the computer becomes a tablet. Importantly, it feels right as a tablet – about the same size and weight – whereas other laptops feel too clunky once they're spun to tablet mode. The keys stay flush to the back of the screen thanks to a pleasingly effective magnet.
As for the screen quality, it's excellent. The Pixelbook has a 2400×1600 pixel resolution (better than a HD TV, but not quite as good as a 4K one), so it's bright, sharp and shows colours really well. It's not the biggest screen on this list – Google list it as 12.3 inches, but if you discount the bezels, it’s an even 12 – but it looks as crystalline as any.
Battery life is good at ten hours of usage, but where it really shines is in standby. I left my test device in standby with the screen closed for about four days over Christmas and it only lost about 10pc of battery life. To me, that's useful: you can leave it on a computer desk at home, much like your chunky old desktop, and not worry that it won't work the next time you sit down to write to a friend.
The Pixelbook comes with a stylus, as is the fashion at the moment. I found the Pixel Pen to be the best stylus I've ever used – it felt precise and sat perfectly in my hand. What did I use it for? Well, a bit of drawing, a bit of painting, some handwritten notes. Yeah, OK, styluses are still gimmicky – but at least Google's one works well.
All this to say, the Google Pixelbook is the best laptop for everyday use. I love the design, I love how light it is, I love the look and feel, and the speed is great. I’d buy one in a heartbeat... if money was no object.
And therein lies my one real gripe with the Pixelbook. Circa £1,000 feels a little on the punchy side to me. It's probably indicative of Google aiming for Apple's market, but I think it's a shame they haven't found a way to sell a version of the model for a couple of hundred quid cheaper, because I can see vast swathes of young people and students shelling out £800 for this, but not £1,000.
Anyway, if you've got the money, this is the one to buy.
2. Microsoft Surface Laptop 3
Why we like it: The purest and best expression of a Windows laptop
Screen size: 13.5-15 inches
Weight: 1.25kg
Battery life: Up to eleven hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 128GB-1TB
Microsoft’s answer to the Macbook is, in a word, excellent. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s simple, it’s well-designed. The whole thing is incredibly finely tuned. Every element is carefully considered and designed with the user in mind. In their advertising, Microsoft has clearly pitched their Surface range to that nebulous range of professionals known as “creatives”. And, to be fair, you can see why. With a choice of 13 or 15 inch touchscreens, a stylish, clutter-free design, and an incredibly fast processor, the Surface Laptop 3 is ideal for artistic, musical, or design pursuits. But to imply that it is only good for that small minority is to undersell the Surface Laptop 3. Simply put, I can’t imagine anyone picking this thing up and not immediately falling in love with it.
At just 1.25kg, the 13.5-inch model that I’ve been testing is one of the lightest laptops out there. I frequently found myself running back to my flat to pick it up, thinking my bag was too light to contain a laptop, only to discover that it had been with me the whole time. And it’s stylish too, I have been using the sandstone (don’t you dare call it rose-gold, a stern Microsoft exec told me) version and it has attracted plenty of attention. The keyboard is a highlight. It is simply a joy to type on, with the subtlest grooves in the keys to make it more comfortable and presses are almost entirely silent. The keyboard also doubles as what Microsoft calls an “omnisonic speaker”, that just means that sound comes through the keyboard rather than through a separate speaker grill, saving room on the laptop’s body while still delivering impressive sound quality. It also has the added (albeit unintentional) benefit of delivering a seriously immersive experience when you’re listening to music while typing.
By saving speaker-space, the Surface Laptop 3 manages to squeeze in a nice large trackpad which is 20pc bigger than on the Surface Laptop 2, which is always appreciated. As with most laptops, the Surface Laptop 3 comes in a variety of permutations. The screen sizes are the obvious differences but internally there are a few chipsets on offer. You can go for the 10th Generation Intel chipsets or AMD chips. The average user won’t notice the difference, to be frank, but both are frighteningly fast. I’m particularly enamoured with the fact that the laptop can launch itself from standby to working in just two seconds, as opposed to the 30 or so I’m used to waiting on my decidedly dated old machine.
In terms of ports, Microsoft has done reasonably well to include connections for USB, USB-C, SD card, and a headphone jack, though only one of each. If I was to make a minor suggestion, I’d have added more of each, though admittedly I never needed to use more than one at a time.
There are bugbears, to be sure, even the cheapest variant is an extortionate sum to pay for a laptop, even one as good as this, and the battery life is merely serviceable certainly not fantastic. I also sort of resent that Microsoft didn’t see fit to include a SIM card slot or E-SIM functionality so the laptop could connect to the internet on the go.
If Microsoft was to produce a budget version, I have absolutely no doubt that it’d be historic; considered one of the best laptops in history. Even so, this one is nothing to sniff at, if you can spare the money and need a new laptop, it’s a must-buy.
3. Honor Magicbook 14
Why we like it: It's a Macbook beater for a fraction of the price
Until about a year ago I'd never even heard of Honor, but it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite tech brands out there. Why? Well, frankly, the prices. First there was the Honor 9X; a decent smartphone costing just £219.99. The brand followed this up with the Honor Band 5, a Fitbit-quality fitness tracker costing about £100 less.
The Magicbook is Honor's first foray into the world of personal computing but it's an assured introduction. As I've come to expect from the Chinese company, the quality is impressive and it's being sold for a price which seems almost ludicrous.
Let's start with the outside. The Magicbook is a real looker, an all-metal dark grey chassis with an electric blue trim around the edge. Thankfully, that chassis is also matte so neatfreaks like me won't need to worry about fingerprint marks. Yet despite being entirely metal on the outside, the Magicbook isn't particularly heavy. It's only 1.47kg and 15.8mm thick when closed so it'll definitely slide into your bag with ease.
Opening it up you'll find the massive 14 inch screen. The laptop has an 84pc body-to-screen ratio so you're getting plenty of space. Smartly, the webcam of the laptop is hidden in the keyboard allowing Honor to save space on the top bezel. The screen itself is well lit and colours looked good to my eye, though I will say it didn't wow me quite as much s the Google Pixelbook. It isn't a touchscreen but honestly, that's no great loss.
As for the rest? Well, the keyboard is a comfortable size to write on for extended periods and the trackpad is positively massive. These are not, I'll admit, things you'll notice much when you're using the laptop, but having tested quite a few at this point, I know how annoying it can be when either of these two features are too small. The final thing worth mentioning is that the power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner which is a handy feature, saving you from having to put in your password every time.
In terms of battery life I'm impressed. Honor claim it can last 10 hours of usage on normal settings and I can well believe it. I tested it in quite a brightly lit room so I didn't have the backlight turned up very much and I managed to make it last nearly 12 hours doing basic internet browsing and word processing. The laptop also comes with a USB-C charger which can take it from 0-46pc in half an hour.
I've also been seriously impressed with the speed of this thing. Booting up from off to the desktop takes less than ten seconds, and you can go from standby to working in about two thanks to the fingerprint scanner. And actually, no matter what I was doing, the Magicbook never slowed down. Streaming 4K movies, playing video-games, video-calling. There was no lag, no overheating, no slowdown. It's an impressive performance, the likes of which you rarely see on laptops at this price.
Unlike some modern laptops, you won't lack for ports either. There's a USB-C port which can be used for charging, two traditional USB ports, a HDMI port, and a headphone jack.
All in all, the Magicbook 14 is just that: magic. I don't know how Honor are justifying selling it for £550 when they could definitely get away with charging more for these specs, but whatever the case, this is a bargain you'll want to snap up.
Screen size: 14 inches
Weight: 1.3kg
Battery life: Up to nine hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 256GB-1TB
Well established computer maker Asus has been churning out Zenbooks since 2011 and we're now onto the 14th iteration. The focus of this family has always been on minimising their footprint: they're small and lightweight.
Unlike other small laptops, the Zenbook range distinguishes itself with a brushed aluminium chassis which helps these computers look significantly more premium. The one I was using was a lovely dark blue. Jealous colleagues asked where I'd got it from.
The 2018 edition which I tested is 13pc smaller than the previous year’s model, with most of the overall size being shaved off the height of the screen, making for a very wide, distinctly rectangular shape (about 13x8 inches when closed). Personally, I really liked it – that lack of height didn't impact on the laptop's userbility, and it makes slipping it into your backpack or laptop case all the easier.
Still, it isn’t cramped. Not a sliver of space is wasted on either the keyboard or the bezel-free screen, making the laptop feel bigger than it is. There’s a shortcut on the touchpad which turns it into a number pad, a clever use of space ideal for those who spend a lot of time doing spreadsheets.
Unlike the Pixelbook, the Asus comes with a wealth of ports: two USB slots, an HDMI port, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, even a microSD card slot. And also unlike the Pixelbook, there's no touchscreen or tablet mode here. It all makes the Zenbook feel like a traditional laptop – and that's no bad thing.
As a basic laptop, it’s worth a place on our Recommended podium.
5. Lenovo Yoga 530
Why we like it: A dependable workhorse at a good price point
From £499, Currys (The product tested for this article was the £599 edition)
Screen size: 14 inches
Weight: 1.6kg
Battery life: Up to eight hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 128GB-512GB
A few years ago Lenovo were best known as makers of solid if unremarkable laptops. Then along came Yoga. Lenovo were the first to really popularise 360 degree hinges, allowing you to flip your laptop into a tablet seamlessly. As more and more companies have copied that trend, Lenovo has rather lost their USP, but at least they caught our attention enough to show us that they're perfectly capable of making a quality product just like the old favourites such as Dell, HP, and Apple.
The design of the Yoga is understated and sleek, a nice matte black exterior, with a metallic-looking interior around the keyboard. The screen is wide and doesn’t waste too much space with unnecessary bezels (although there is a large one on the bottom edge.)
Everything is perfectly in proportion here and neatly thought through. There's a wide keyboard with soft, quiet keys. A wide, bright Full HD screen. Two lovely old-fashioned USB ports (which is hardly a given these days as most laptops transition to the smaller USB-C ports). You can even get a finger-print scanner for added security and to make payments through Paypal more securely.
Like the Pixelbook, this is a laptop-tablet hybrid, so you can flip the keyboard under the screen. Unfortunately, I found the unit to be a bit too heavy for that; at 1.6kg, it just doesn't feel that comfortable in your hands or on your lap like a normal tablet. Also, I would have appreciated a magnet on the back of the screen to lock the keys in place.
The speakers are good quality, although they're oddly positioned on the bottom of the laptop. Why fire the audio straight down, into your desk?
As with many laptops, you can play around with the exact spec of this laptop. The brand are currently stocking three different versions of the Yoga 530, and you’ll find further options across the internet, each with slightly different processors, storage space, and other internal specs. I tested the model with the Intel Pentium Processor and 128GB of storage, which suited my needs just fine.
On the outside, all look the same, so make sure to read up on what you're getting before you buy.
All in all, there are wrinkles with the Yoga 530 that stopped me from pushing it higher on this list, but fundamentally, it does the job of everyday computing very well. In my eyes buying this laptop is the technological equivalent of adopting an old labrador from the dog shelter. It’s no showdog, trying to dazzle you with fancy tricks, or a puppy, all newness and excitement. No, this is a sturdy companion that'll do what you need it to and no more.
For those looking for something basic, this is an ideal unit for a fair price.
6. 2019 Apple Macbook Air
From £1,199, John Lewis
Screen size: 13.3 inches
Weight: 1.37kg
Battery life: Up to 10 hours
Operating system: Mac OS
Storage space: 128GB-512GB
Once you’ve decided to buy a Macbook, nothing else can scratch that itch. They're highly design, highly enviable, and certainly highly priced beasts. You're either susceptible to their charms or you're not.
Lets start with those charms. The recently released Macbook Air looks absolutely fantastic. Of course it does. This is Apple: Jony Ive, the company's chief design officer, wouldn't get away with the dodgy spelling of his first name if his products were anything less than glorious.
This is the smallest Macbook yet; 17pc smaller than its predecessor, and that means it's light and easy to carry around. It's not as light as the Pixelbook, but then it does have a slightly bigger screen.
The screen is a retina display, which Apple has been using on all its other Macbooks and iPhones for a while now, and it looks fantastic – bright, sharp, popping with colour. Apple have trimmed the bezels, letting the screen stand out. The speakers are also 25pc louder than the last model.
The trackpad is fantastic, larger than most of the others on the market, and it features fingerprint unlocking and pressure sensing. Small but welcome changes.
Perhaps less welcome is the butterfly keyboard, where the keys lie more or less flat against the device. It's a Marmite feature: personally I hated it. Because there’s little press on the keys, I felt the need to give them a good thwack. Not a stress-free experience.
Anyway, that's a minor quibble. The Macbook Air is certainly a very good, very desirable laptop. But do you need one for everyday use? I'd suggest not. The truth is that for everyday use, you can find other laptops that are just as good for sending emails and watching iPlayer, and they won't cost as much. Or you can pay in the same region for a Pixelbook and get a similarly specced computer that also doubles up as a tablet.
Screen size: 13.3 inch
Weight: 1.1kg
Battery life: 11 hours
Operating system: Chrome OS
Storage space: 64GB-256GB
The original Google Pixelbook is my recommended pick in this list, but it comes with the caveat that it's pricey. Two years after the Pixelbook’s original release, we have the follow-up which answers that criticism – the Pixelbook Go is over £300 cheaper than the original. Yet they're not entirely comparable devices; that drop in cost comes at a price.
The design of the Go is lovely: a simple metal chassis with rounded corners available in either black or a sandy pink. The bottom of the device is softly corrugated, which is unusual and helps to ensure the laptop doesn’t slide around when you’re using it. With the lid closed, it’s just 1.3cm wide: slim enough to slide into most bag pockets.
Under the hood, the touchscreen is bright and easy to use, there's smashing battery life and solid standby time. But some of the original's best features are missing: the 360-degree hinges that allowed you to turn the laptop into a tablet, for example. Storage space has also been slashed in half.
I still absolutely loved the Pixelbook Go, it's a beautiful laptop which works really well, but it's more like a generic Chromebook (the vast majority of which are still cheaper) than the superior Pixelbook.
8. Avita Liber 14
Screen size: 14 inches
Weight: 1.46kg
Battery life: Six-ten hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 128GB-512GB
The first thing to talk about is how stylish this laptop is. Unlike most laptops, grey and black are not colourway options here. Your choices are between a striking lightning blue and pearl white, or beautiful design-led versions which come with either a pink paisley print or whirling gold and blue floral designs.
Add to this the slim 16mm metal body and the weight of just 1.46kg and you’ve got a sleek, stylish laptop whose design calls to mind Macbooks of a few years ago. It is definitely not something you’re going to be concerned about lugging around with you.
The screen is pretty great. It’s only full HD, rather than the 4K that some laptops are boasting, but at 14 inches from corner to corner, there’s plenty of space, and it lights up nice and brightly too. Colour differentiation is great and, honestly, watching Netflix and YouTube videos was a joy.
In terms of other handy bits to know, the keyboard is perfectly adequate (although the single-height enter key was a bit of an annoyance at first) and I really appreciated the massive trackpad. There’s a smorgasbord of ports including: a headphone jack, two USBs, a USB-C, a MicroUSB, and a microSD card slot, which is all pretty useful; the only thing I thought might be missing is an HDMI port for plugging your laptop into the TV, but given that most modern TV’s allow you to cast content via your internet connection, maybe that’s me showing my age.
Finally, there’s a solid 720p HD webcam as well as a fingerprint scanner for those that need those options.
If this is all sounding suspiciously positive, well… good. I feel pretty positive about this laptop, despite it’s not-too-exorbitant price. The design is great, it has everything it needs, and it isn’t bad to use by any means.
However, the budget price does make itself known in some areas. The processor isn’t the fastest in the world and that becomes clear when you have too many tabs or applications open at once. It’s also discernibly slower than other comparable devices to boot up. It’s far too slow to play most modern games and even pulling up files from the 128GB hard drive (which is also quite small, while we're talking about it) feels sluggish.
The speakers are weak and tinny; I’d seriously recommend investing in a decent set of headphones if you purchase this laptop.
Battery life is mediocre. On the screen it claims of being able to do up to 10 hours, but I have to imagine this is with all the settings turned all the way down. I’ve spent the day typing up reviews on this computer, which shouldn’t be too strenuous, and I’m down to 15pc after about six hours, which isn’t great.
Still, it feels somewhat churlish to gripe about these sorts of things in an article entitled ‘best laptops for everyday use’. For word processing and general browsing, there’s not much to complain about here, plus the eye-catching design is really unusual and marks this one out as something special.
9. HP Envy X360
Screen size: From 13.3 inches
Weight: From 1.3kg
Battery life: Up to 11 hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 128GB-1TB
Search any forum about laptops and the question that inevitably comes up is: “Can I play the Sims 4 on it?” Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, look no further.
The HP Envy is the closest thing you can get to a gaming laptop without being a gaming laptop. What I mean by that is, it’ll be ideal for playing things like the Sims 4 or Football Manager, but probably not the one for playing Call Of Duty or Warcraft.
Even as a standard laptop, I’m pretty impressed. It manages to pack a full-sized keyboard onto its laptop body, and you get 360 degree hinges, a touchscreen, fantastic speakers, a bright and sharp screen, and all the ports and connections you can shake a stick at.
It’s great on the go, charging up in a claimed 45 minutes (more like an hour, I found).
But in terms of its gaming credentials, you’ve got a lot of options. You can choose an AMD processor and graphics chip, or go with a version which uses an Intel/NVIDIA G-Force combination. Either way, games look fantastic and work speedily.
In this regard, I’m slightly surprised HP haven’t opted for a hybrid hard drive like the ASUS Vivobook which strikes me as absolutely ideal for a laptop like this (perfect for storing all those Sims 4 expansion packs) but with 128GB as standard, there should be plenty.
10. ASUS ZenBook Duo (UX481)
Screen size: 14 inch
Weight: 1.5kg
Battery life: 11.5 hours
Operating system: Windows
Storage space: 512GB
Getting the UX481 out of the box, I was baffled. As you can see from the picture above, the design of this laptop is unusual in that half the space which is usually reserved for the keyboard is devoted to a slim little second screen. "What possible reason could anyone have for this slim-line second screen?’ I wondered. However, after having spent the day working on it, I am sold.
The screen itself is as you expect, bright, clear and easy to read off. The bezels are tiny so you genuinely do get a lot of screen.
And then you get a second helping with a touch enabled screen on the keyboard. It's super useful. You can, for example, put a video on the main screen and transcribe it on the smaller screen.
However, the downside of the second screen is that the keyboard is tiny and the touchpad is off on the right hand side.
Ultimately, how much you get out of this one is going to come down to how much you need the second screen. In addition, let’s be honest, the price is not exactly wallet-friendly.
Designers and creatives, come forth, this is the laptop for you. For everyone else, you can probably skip it.
Frequently asked questions about laptops
How often should you update your laptop?
You need to update your mattress every eight years, your TV every five years, and your phone every two years. So what about laptops? How long should you hang onto your device before it’s officially outdated? Chloe Harris-Williams, tablets & computing buyer at John Lewis says: “We would recommend updating your laptop every three to four years, depending on how much it is used during this time.”
Are there any particular brands who are known as the best in class?
When it comes to smartphones, everyone knows that Apple and Samsung will always deliver a good quality product, regardless of the model. Is it the same for laptop manufacturers? When the Telegraph asked Elford, he said: “All the major laptop brands (HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus) produce good quality devices. Apple Mac still stands out from a design and quality perspective.”
What is the difference between a laptop and a notebook?
A notebook is just a slim, light laptop. In general, notebooks tend to save space by using SSD storage rather than the traditional HDD storage of older laptops. However, these days most bigger laptops are using SSD storage as well.
The one that is a bit different is a Cloudbook or Chromebook. These are smaller laptops with almost no storage whatsoever. The idea is that you store all your files and data in the cloud and just download them when you need them. All well and good, as long as you’ve got a decent internet connection, but if you’re travelling a lot, these may not be ideal.
What is the best processor for a laptop?
If you’re just buying a laptop for everyday use, you probably don’t really need to worry about the processor as you won’t usually be doing anything that needs much processing power.
The vast majority of laptops use Intel processors. These are split into Core, Pentium, and Celeron, the first being widely considered the best, the last the worst. Most laptops I’ve found through my research use Intel Core which comes in i3, i5, i7, and i9 varieties and each has nine generations which mark slight improvements. Essentially, the higher the numbers the better the processor.
But, again, it depends on your use. If you’re doing very basic stuff, an Intel Core i3 processor will do just fine. Maybe an i5, if you’re going a bit harder. You wouldn’t need an i9 processor unless you were doing very, very high-intensity gaming.
However, Intel do have a new rival whose processors are starting to appear on the market. This rival is AMD who make, from most to least powerful, Ryzen, Athlon, and A-Series processors.
AMD is popular among gamers because they make both graphics chips and processors meaning that the technology has been designed to work together from the off, rather than being fused together at a later stage. Some people claim this means that AMD processors are better for gaming, but it’s a hotly contested area.
Either way, if you’re just doing basic stuff, you really don’t need to worry about it.
Should you consider buying a refurbished laptop?
Absolutely. You can get some serious discounts by picking up refurbished laptops. But remember a few things.
Firstly, you should only buy refurbished laptops from certified sellers. Lenovo and Dell both have official ‘outlet’ websites, where you can pick up refurbished laptops that have been checked over and restored to as good a working condition as possible by certified engineers.
You should be a lot more careful when buying ‘refurbished’ laptops from unofficial sellers as there’s basically no guarantee that you’re not getting some clapped out old hand-me-down.
Glossary of terms:
RAM: Random Access Memory. This is basically the part of your computer which is running a programme at any one moment. The more RAM you have, the more programmes you can run at any one time without the device slowly down or freezing.
Processor: When your computer wants to do something it inputs a line of code and outputs your desired result. The processor is the part which organises that transaction. It’s a bit like a translator between you and your computer. The faster it can process your commands, the faster your computer will be.
SSD: Solid state drive. This is a type of hard drive (the ‘memory’ of the computer where you store your files.) SSD storage is used in a lot of modern laptops because it’s smaller and lighter, ideal for thinner laptops. It’s also faster than HDD, so apps and games load faster. The downside is that it’s generally more expensive so you’ll get less storage for your buck.
Cloud storage: Rather than save your files onto your computer, you save them into a private box on the internet which only you can access from any computer. If your laptop got broken or destroyed, you could easily get your files back. The downside is that if you can’t connect to the internet, you can’t get your files. There are also various privacy concerns around giving your data to a big company like Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Dropbox.
HDD: Hard disk drive. An older method of saving files which is bigger, bulkier, and loads a lot more slowly. However, it does have a major upside. HDD storage is very cheap, so you could easily get a lot of storage space for a fraction of the price you’d pay for the same amount of SSD storage.
OS: Operating system. If you’re buying a new laptop, generally this will be Windows 10, or ChromeOS if you’ve got a Chromebook. There’s also MacOS on Macbooks. The latter is significantly different to the former two, so it’s worth heading down to your local PC shop and testing them out before buying.
TB/MB/B: Short for terrabytes, megabytes, and bytes. These are just units of computer storage from biggest to smallest. The more you have, the more photos, music, and videos you’ll be able to store on your device.
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