The Great Laptop Search

When I shop for laptops I use a rather simple formula. It is usually the cheapest one that will do what I need it to that isn't a brand I dislike. The graphics card is of big importance. Processor not so much, as laptop CPUs are typically neutered in some way or another for the reasons of power efficiency or price point. It is funny because there are times when the lower end laptop processors run faster than their high end cousins due to the high end ones constantly down clocking to save power. Which isn't always a bad thing. Enough memory is important too, and I tend to just figure if the hard drive is bigger than my current laptop it will get the job done.

I don't have illusions that laptops are as fast and capable as desktops, I tend think of them as companions to a larger system, but they have their uses.

So when I originally looked for laptops for my wife I was looking for one that was comparable to her desktop in performance, but nothing that would out perform it. I had found what I thought would work online and took my wife to Best Buy to take a look a similar model. That was where I found the flaw in my formula as my wife pointed out she liked the way a Toshiba looked and that it had a numeric keypad.

Appearance? I didn't take that into account. I should know better than that by now. To continue my naivety I kept on the hunt, only to be brought to the realization that the Toshiba wasn't excessively priced or a bad computer. It took longer than that sentence might suggest.

Eventually I picked out a nice mid-range Toshiba of the model she liked, only to finally get her a much higher end one due to graphics card options. End result, it out performs her desktop. CPU? The i7 easily dispatches her Phenom. GPU? Faster and more RAM. RAM? Twice as much and twice as fast. Ditto that for the hard drive. Envious? Only a little. It does out perform my desktop in some ways.