A friend of mine recently asked me if I had any tips for her on how to buy a laptop, and was happy with the advice that I gave her. Since she was not the first person to be happy with similar advice from me, I am wrote up this short piece, on how I'd buy a laptop. This was in March 2006. In May 2006, this page provoked Alan Grosskurth to respond with his own (very valuable) two-cents! A formatted version of his email follows my own.

Date: 1 March 2006 (Approx)
From: James Bergstra
To: Anonymous Friend
Subject: laptop advice

Buying laptops is getting to be about as complicated as buying cars! Just cheaper, so it's not as bad if you get the wrong thing :P You should talk to people in your [school] program if you can, to see if there are any special considerations... but generally, from a technical point of view, almost any laptop you can get will run whatever programs you want. The main variables are

Modern processors are all fine for most applications. The only reasons I can think of for getting an expensive processor are to play 3D games, to power a popular internet server, to process large quantities of music or video data. But you probably do none of those things. You shouldn't get upset at not having a Turion 64 unless you have a specific reason (i.e. a specific application won't run.) If I got a laptop, the most important things to me would be the weight and battery life, because I would use it as a portable typewriter.

The best deal on laptops is probably still the refurbished 3-year old. Many companies lease laptops on a 3yr basis, so there is a continuous stream of 3yr-old laptops into used PC vendors. If you look around you can find a fast Pentium 3, or pentium M (skip the P4) from IBM for $500-700. Just verify that the keys all work and that the display looks bright and clear (no dead pixels), and that the unit generally looks like it has been treated well. Just make sure you get one that has at least 256MB of RAM.

With regards to upgrades... I have never heard of anyone upgrading their laptop, and I think even desktop upgrades are relatively rare. Upgrading components is an expensive way to improve performance. Sometimes there is a very specific component that you can upgrade effectively (like a hard drive) but you can always upgrade hard drives, so it isn't a differentiating factor. If you can't upgrade your processor, graphics card, or main memory, that is normal... you wouldn't usually upgrade just one of those things anyway because they all go together.

That said, it can be a great idea to upgrade your battery. If you happen to look into 2nd hand computers, your salesman should point out that battery life has diminished since the machine was new [possibly a lot]. But you can easily send away for a replacement battery [even better than the original] for about $70.

Date: 2 May 2006 03:16:24 -0400
From: Alan Grosskurth
To: James Bergstra
Subject: laptop advice

I'd like to dispute your claim that ``The best deal on laptops is probably still the refurbished 3-year old.'' A used Thinkpad may be OK for power users who want lowest weight, the best keyboard, and plan to run Linux with a lightweight window manager. But the Pentium 3 is definitely getting long in the tooth these days. My P3 struggles with Firefox; most GTK2 apps recommend 1GHz+.

For most users, I'd recommend a new laptop from Future Shop/Best Buy/ Canada Computers. Six months ago, My cousin got a thin-and-light (~5 lbs) AMD64 Compaq for ~$1000 and he loves it. You can even go cheaper ($600-$900 range); no point in paying roughly same amount for a three-year-old laptop with a slow CPU, sketchy battery, sketchy hard drive, and no built-in wireless.

OK, without further ado: The best deal on laptops today is

You can even go slightly cheaper:

(Possibly an even better deal: The new iBooks due out sometime in the next few weeks. Hopefully they'll provide a dual-core chip in a lightweight form factor for around $1000 CAD.)