Buying Guide

Laptop Buying Guide: How to Choose a Laptop

How to choose a laptop without a list of this year's models: reading spec sheets, size and weight, gaming machines, optical drives, small laptops, and the router that connects them all.

Most laptop buying guides are lists of products that are out of date within months and paid for by the links they contain. This section takes the other approach. Each guide explains the decision itself: which six lines on a spec sheet decide your experience, why the same graphics chip name can be 40 percent slower in a thin case, what a 13 inch screen costs you against a 15, and why almost nobody should buy a laptop with a built-in disc drive. The reasoning holds for years; you supply this month's models.

The guides inherit the questions the original site was asked most between 2008 and 2015. Compare laptops was a standing page then, with reader-submitted head-to-head comparisons; the modern version is a method and a fill-in table. The best gaming laptops page from the reviews era named specific models; the new guide explains power limits, screens and cooling so that any list makes sense. The netbook coverage from 2009 and 2010 becomes a guide to what a good small laptop looks like now, and the 2008 routers post becomes a current home Wi-Fi guide.

Every guide leads with a quick answer and a spec card of the numbers that matter, then explains the trade-offs in prose and tables. Where a figure is a rule of thumb (1.5 kg as the daily-carry limit, 16 GB as the memory floor), the guide says why and when to break it.

There are no affiliate links, sponsored placements or price widgets on these pages, and if that ever changes a disclosure will appear at the top of the page concerned. Recommendations are about categories and specifications, not brands.