Top 6 Best-Value Laptop Computers

Shopping for the best value isn’t always about finding the lowest price; it’s also about what you get for your money. On the laptop aisle, shopping for a good value can be a difficult feat indeed, as manufacturers will often sacrifice features and overall quality in an effort to lower the sticker price. Here are a few pointers for finding high quality at lower prices, along with a few of laptops we consider the best values around.

Processor and Graphics

The internal components of the laptop often determine a great deal of the price of the laptop. Faster processors with more cores are more expensive, but also offer better performance. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a cheap processor may be underpowered, out of date, or both. Many HP systems, for example, reduce the price by offering systems equipped with AMD processors, which offer fairly similar performance to Intel CPUs, but at a lower price. Others, however, opt for mobile processors, like the Intel Atom, or Celeron. Compared with the current Core processors, these offer significantly slower performance, to a degree that will have a daily impact. One way to get a great price without giving up quality performance is to look for systems with the previous CPU model line, called Sandy Bridge. The performance will still be quite good—better than an underpowered mobile chip—but the price will be lower.

Graphics processing is another factor that can drive up price quickly, because the cost of the GPU can easily add a hundred dollars to the price of any laptop. The good news here is that integrated graphics, in which graphics processing is performed by the laptops CPU instead of a separate component, has improved to the point that few PC users need the extra hardware.

Hard Drives

Premium laptops will usually boast solid-state drives (SSDs), which replace the spinning disks of traditional hard drives with flash memory modules similar to those found in USB flash drives, but at higher HP 2133 battery capacity. These drives have the benefit of being fast, which has a positive impact on overall performance, as well as more durable, especially when being moved. Lucky for you, however, there’s a silver-lining for the value shopper, because the storage capacity offered by SSDs isn’t quite what you might find in a mechanical hard drive. Opting for a slower hard drive can both save you money and double or even triple the amount of storage space offered in the laptop.

Software and Operating Systems

Pre-installed software, trial-ware, sample-ware. Call it what you will, but the reason OEMs put so much stuff onto brand new PCs is all about the profit margin. You don’t need an icon on your desktop to take you to eBay, because anyone with a browser can type AussieBatt.com, ebay.com without difficulty; but your seeing the icon and possibly clicking it makes it a great advertising opportunity for the auction site, which is why Ebay is willing to pay a few cents in order to have manufacturers put it there. More extras mean more money, which improves the very thin profit margin on whatever budget system you’re thinking of buying.

However, manufacturers aren’t stupid, and they know that all this bloatware isn’t winning them any friends, which is why premium systems generally have far less bloatware to begin with. Some even tout it as a feature, and Microsoft has made a few bucks offering a service, wherein it cleans crapware off of a system, with just Windows and the necessary drivers remaining, and charging $99 a pop.

The good news is that cleaning off the crud isn’t terribly difficult, just time consuming. Set aside an hour or so after purchasing your new laptop with Business Notebook 6910p Battery and you can get that system as clean and fast as more expensive laptops while letting other companies foot part of the bill.

Finally, if you want to really save some money, you might want to ditch Windows altogether. Google offers one of the cheapest alternatives right now, and for someone who wants a laptop just to check Facebook or browse the Web, it’s nearly perfect.