However you’ve gotten hold of that money, you will soon discover that making up your mind over which product to choose is a lot more complicated than, well, buying a new pair of shoes. There are just too many laptop models with varying combinations of features in the market. Trying to determine which laptop brand, never mind which model, can be a real nightmare.

And buying a laptop computer can be bigger pain in that part of your anatomy where the sun doesn’t shine than buying a desktop PC for example. More personal than the personal computer, laptops come in an ever expanding range of models. Consumers, consequently, may find themselves in a purchasing paralysis, or worse, end up buying a laptop not suited for their computing needs and requirements.

But choosing which laptop to buy doesn’t have to be a process approximating a root canal. A little research with some real-life assessment should do the trick and make buying a notebook computer an enjoyable, or at least a very much learning experience.

Job Description for Laptops

Ideally, before approaching your friendly computer retailer, you should at least know why you’re buying a laptop. For what tasks and operations do you intend to use your future laptop? Or, to look at it from a different angle, what kind of mobile computer user are you? Are you a gamer, a regular word-processor-spreadsheet-presentation guy or gal, or a multimedia, graphics-heavy, movie-editing demi-geek?

If you intend to use your laptop as a mobile extension of your desktop PC, and use it for writing reports and spreadsheets, and for making presentations, a plain vanilla model should be good enough for your computing needs. If on the other hand, you have to work with multimedia files and other applications that require more computing firepower, then you should opt for those bulky, heavy, and more expensive mobile semi-behemoths.

Microprocessor

Intel has recently introduced its Core Duo CPUs or dual-core processors for mobile applications. AMD has also announced its dual-core chips for notebook computers. While these developments signify the advent of dual-core processors as the biggest fad in mobile computing, Intel’s Pentium M processors and similar chips from AMD and other vendors are still highly capable processors.

The coming of dual-core processor-equipped laptops may also signal a dramatic drop in prices of present-model laptops.

Memory

At present, an ideal amount should be 512MB. Anything smaller than that could hamper your notebook’s performance, but while the truism more is better usually applies in IT, for the moment there is no compelling reason to go beyond 1GB. Unless you intend to compute the mathematical relationships between the probability of seeing a supernova in your lifetime and the likelihood of the next coup attempt being successful, you will find 512MB just perfect.

Hard Disk Drive

Laptops used to have smaller and slower hard disk drives compared with those of the desktop PCs. Today’s laptops, however, are more or less at par with their desktop counterparts in terms of features and under-the-hood firepower. It doesn’t cause much stir anymore to find laptops with 80GB or bigger hard drives. This doesn’t preclude, however, the fact that somewhere down the road you will end up buying an external hard disk drive.

Graphics Card

This is more an issue for gamers and other users who require considerably more graphics push from their laptops. Such users may opt for high-end systems, such as the ATI Mobility Radeon X700, nVidia GeForce 6800, or something newer and stronger. For the less graphics-demanding users, medium-range cards should do the trick.

Display System

Late-model laptops come with LCD information display systems. Active-matrix displays, such as a TFT-LCD monitor, offer high quality display and a fast response rate. Active-matrix LCDs offer enhanced viewing for users who are likely to use their laptops under less-than-ideal lighting conditions, such as those likely to be encountered when traveling. Other options include a dual-scan display and an HPA, or High-Performance Addressing, display.

There are other issues that you should consider before buying a laptop computer. You should, for example, put much weight on the product’s upgradeability or expandability. To be sure that you’d get your money’s worth, you should buy a notebook that more or less is future-proof, and would guarantee you adequate computing capabilities for the longest time.