Follow this buying guide when scouting for your next laptop

For users with basic needs such as accessing emails, Web browsing or working on Word or Excel, notebooks with Intel’s entry level M series and Atom series processors should suffice. However, there are those who simply need more. For them, there’s this laptop buying guide:

Processors: Most notebooks are driven by Intel chipsets—the powerful Core i9 or Core i7 chipsets for power users or Core i5 and Core i3 processors for moderate users. Also, look for the 8th generation Intel processors as they are faster than the 7th gen processors. Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD’s) new Ryzen 5 and 7 chipsets are comparable to Intel’s 8th gen Core i5 and i7 chipsets, respectively.

Graphic cards: There are the less powerful ones that are built into the motherboard and rely on the system’s RAM,. called integrated GPUs (graphic processing units—by Intel). The more powerful ones—made by AMD and Nvidia—have their own RAM and are called dedicated GPUs. These can handle graphic-intensive tasks involving 3D animations such as games and can do video editing faster.

Display quality: A notebook with Full HD (1920x1080p) resolution will look a lot sharper. Similarly, HDR (high dynamic range) boosts the dynamic range of a video, resulting in richer colours and better contrast compared to notebooks with SDR (standard dynamic range).

Storage: If you are only interested in more storage space, opt for notebooks with HDD (hard disk drive). If you want a performance boost, opt for SSD (solid state drive) or a combination of SSD and HDD hard drives. SSDs can read and write data in lesser time, resulting in a faster boot up of the PC as well as the apps and games stored on it.