Personal or Business

The first decision you need to make is whether or not this laptop will be used for strictly personal and household needs or if it will be used for business purposes, you may even want to use it for both. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you are buying this laptop for personal and household use at this time; even if you think you may want to start an Internet business from home sometime down the road.

What’s In It for Me?

Now that we know what the general use is for your laptop, we need to decide what exactly you want it to do for you. What do you want to use the laptop for? This is the most important question in the buying process. You may find what seems like a great deal because of the price, but when you get it home and find out you can’t do your household budget on it because there is no spreadsheet program then you realize it wasn’t such a good deal after all. So, before you even go looking I suggest you make a list of things that you want your laptop to be able to do – things that you are not willing to compromise on – and then a list of things that would be nice, but that won’t cause you to walk away from a truly good deal if some or even all of these capabilities are not available on the model you choose. So, let’s make our two lists and see what we come up with:

List 1:

• Spreadsheet
• Word processing
• Internet Access
• Desktop Publishing
• Extra Battery
• MS Money or Quicken
• Readable/Writeable CD Drive
• Readable DVD Drive
• Minimum 512 mb RAM
• Norton or McAffee Security Program

List 2:

• Digital Photography Program
• Additional Clipart Programs
• 1 gigabyte RAM
• Readable AND Writeable DVD
• Adapter for Vehicle (plug in at power point)
• MS Publisher
• MS FrontPage

(These lists contain a bare minimum of options and capabilities of computers and are used here as examples only.)

You know that this laptop will be used primarily for household use, maybe for a home business down the road. Now you know exactly what you need and what extras you want from the laptop you buy.

There are two more important questions that need answering before you make this purchase:

1) New or refurbished

2) Buy off the shelf, already put together or build your own (customize it).

Let’s take a look at the first question: Should you buy a new computer or a refurbished model? The answer is one you have to decide, all I can do is tell you what I know about refurbished computers and you can decide if it’s the right way to go or not.

Refurbished computers are almost always ones that have been returned because the customer just didn’t like it or, more likely ones that have been sent in for repair. The company sends a new computer to the person who sent his/hers in and goes about repairing the one that was sent in. The technicians make sure they bring the computer back to new condition and the company sells it as refurbished. On the Internet you can find sites that sell nothing but refurbished computers and other electronics such as Refurbdepot.com or many manufacturers, such as Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, and many others sell their own refurb models direct from their own website. Usually a 90 day warranty is offered with the purchase regardless of where you buy it from and most places will offer one, two, or more years of warranty coverage for an additional cost. If you decide to buy refurbished, I strongly advise you to purchase an extended warranty for at least one year. If nothing goes wrong it may seem like a waste of money, but if something does go wrong you will be happy you have the warranty. Are you at all familiar with how much computer techs charge to repair laptops? Not to mention you will be without it until it is fixed. If you do decide to buy a refurb however, then you can skip the next paragraph, if however, you decide to buy new then read on.

2) Buy off the shelf, already put together or build your own (customize it):

There are basically two ways you can go about making this purchase:

Buy a laptop off the shelf, already put together and ready to go.

Build your own, customize it to be exactly what you want.

In the beginning we decided that your laptop was going to be for primarily household use. Now we are going to make the assumption that you decided to buy new and not refurbished. If you were buying refurbished, it would be comparable to buying it off the shelf, you most likely will not have the opportunity to customize it.

Buying new, off the shelf is usually a little less expensive than customizing and you can probably find one that has all the characteristics of List 1 above, plus some extras you may or may not want. But in order to get everything on List 1 and some or all of List 2, you will have to customize. Personally, I believe customizing, or "building your own" is the way to go because you have control over almost all the features of the computer. You decide the size of the hard drive, the amount of RAM, what kind of CD or DVD drive comes with it, etc. Otherwise, you are buying what the manufacturer put together and that may work for you but there were some features I wanted and the only way to get them was to build my own. Shop around, see what’s available and if you find a laptop with a package that has everything you want, great. Just know that if you don’t find one with the package you want you do have the option of building your own.

Take a Trip without Leaving Home

You’re almost there. You’ve decided on a laptop for household use that you are going to purchase new and build it yourself. Now it’s time to shop around and find out where you will get the best deal. The laptop will be yours, no kids allowed. But you still have the family computer right? You know the desktop that you never get to use because the kids or your spouse are always on it? Will, kick everybody off for a couple of hours, get online and start comparison shopping. You can do all the comparing, building, etc right from your house and when you find exactly what you want you can pay on line and have it delivered. It beats running all over town or calling the various stores and hoping you get someone on the phone that has some sense.

Summary

Let’s take a look at a brief summary of this article:

• Decide whether the primary use is business or household.
• What features do you want it to have?
• Should you go new or refurbished?
• Should you buy off the shelf or build my own?
• Make sure you comparison shop; after all, you can do it all right from home it doesn’t get much easier.

I hope this article has provided at least some information that has helped in your decision as to what to look for when buying a laptop.

Enjoy Your New Laptop!