Choosing your perfect laptop

• For most home users, an i3 or i5 CPU is more than enough, an i7 is required for users who typically do a lot of analytical work and need multiple cores, i9 processors are very expensive and give a very small real work performance increase over other processors.
• Most machines will run well on 8 GB of RAM for everyday tasks; 16 GB will give you good performance all the time for most applications; 32 GB is for users who typically do a lot of analytical work.
• HDDs normally start from 1 TB in size, SSDs range from 256 GB up to 2 TB. Some systems will have a HDD and SSD. An SSD will make the biggest difference in terms of your user experience, initial start up time, time for loading programs etc.
• Most motherboards normally have a basic graphics card built in, which is more than good enough for day to day tasks. Systems that specifically have additional GPUs installed are high end and normally expensive.
• A machine with at least 3 USB ports is an important consideration because an external mouse already uses one of the ports. If the machine has only 2 USB ports you will get frustrated if you constantly need to change devices connected to the 1 remaining port.