The laptop market is full of competing brands, with all kinds of different technical specs to compare. It’s a buyer’s market, unless you’re shopping for MacBooks, in which case you can just buy whatever Apple tells you is the best, for the price of your first-born child. And lots of people prefer that, because this stuff can get overwhelming.
But fortunately, we’ve put together this helpful guide for knowing what performance specs to look for in a business laptop, so that you can edit all the spreadsheets and PowerPoint visual charts to your heart’s content, without any lag or hiccups.
Screen Size, Resolution, and Aspect Ratio
Screen size and resolution are two important but different measurements of how much screen space you’ll have. The physical screen dimensions are semi-related to the display resolution, but it’s not a 1:1 measurement, and we also need to account for screen ratios.
The standard aspect ratio these days is 16:9 widescreen. When people say 1080p, they mean 1920×1080 resolution, which is a 16:9 aspect ratio. But having a widescreen monitor does not guarantee you will get 1920×1080 resolution, because there are smaller 16:9 resolutions such as 1280×720 (720p), or even 1366×768, and it depends on how powerful the laptops graphics are.
Remember that higher resolutions means more pixels are being fit onto the screen, so if you want the maximum amount of workspace, consider a screen like this HP touchscreen laptop, which has a 15.6” screen at 3840 x 2160 resolution, which is an UHD (ultra HD) 16:9 aspect ratio.
I know this can all be a bit confusing, the important thing is to just remember that bigger screen sizes does not mean higher resolutions, especially if you are buying an older refurbished model from before all this UHD / 4K technology.
RAM and CPU
The amount of RAM you strictly need depends on the tasks you’re doing, but it’s a really good idea to future-proof yourself. While 8GB of RAM is still “good enough” in 2021, it’s a good idea to just spring for 16GB as the minimum.
RAM is very important for multitasking and swapping between windows and browser tabs. When you start to use up all of your RAM, your system tries to clear old data from the RAM cache.
So if you have a really big Google spreadsheet open in Chrome, then click to another tab, the system will “flush” the big spreadsheet from your RAM cache, and reload it when you click back to the spreadsheet, reloading it all over again and clearing something else.
You can avoid these slowdowns and have a seamless experience with lots of tasks open by having a minimum of 16GB of RAM nowadays.
The CPU is also incredibly important, but can get very confusing in the technical specs. You have to be aware of how many CPU cores it has, but also the clock speed and other things. So for example, you could have a dual-core with a clock speed of 4ghz, or a quad-core with a clock speed of 2.8ghz.
Which would perform faster, the one with 2 cores at 4ghz, or the one with 4 cores at 2.8ghz? And the answer would be complicated, so you should research the ideal CPU specs for different types of tasks such as video editing or compiling code.
Integrated Graphics
Laptops don’t come with graphics cards like you would install in a desktop PC. The CPU in your laptop typically has an integrated video chip, which will borrow some of your system RAM as a type of VRAM (video RAM), whereas a desktop graphics card would have its own dedicated VRAM.
For example, I have a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card in my desktop PC which has its own 4GB of VRAM, so it never needs to borrow from my 16GB of system RAM. But I also have an AMD Ryzen CPU with its own video chip (APU), and if I turn that on, it will use my system RAM for video memory. But it doesn’t perform as good as my GTX 1050 Ti with dedicated VRAM, and that’s pretty much the problem of laptops for graphic editing and gaming.
But you can still buy a laptop with a beefy video chip that outperforms my desktop graphics, it’s just a matter of what you’re willing to spend. You can check out the best integrated graphics for gaming laptops in 2021, and their graphical power will of course transfer to your work tasks.
Storage
Storage is a big consideration, but it’s not only size that matters. SSDs are much faster than mechanical HDDs. While a 240GB SSD holds less storage than a 500GB mechanical HDD, the SSD will boot up your system and copy files much, much faster than an HDD.
No matter how big a mechanical HDD is, booting up Windows 10 will on average take around 5 minutes, from pressing your power button to the login screen. On an SSD, it’s more like 20 seconds. Your RAM and CPU matter, but not as much as you think, it’s all a matter of how fast the hard drive is able to read and write data, and an SSD will typically always outperform a mechanical HDD.
Storage is relatively cheap nowadays though, compared to RAM and CPU, so you could easily get a couple of 500GB SSDs without breaking the bank.