PC shopping can be a miserable experience. The same variety that makes it possible for you to find a laptop specifically designed to manage both your neon geranium business and your online polka-streaming startup also means that the market is flooded with laptops that aren't tailored to your particular needs. It's much more work than it's worth to educate yourself on every tiny difference between laptop A from manufacturer X and laptop B from manufacturer Y.
We're here to help. To give you some guidance in this back-to-school season, we've set up three basic laptop categories. Basic laptops emphasize price over performance or size; gaming laptops emphasize performance over price or size; and lightweight laptops emphasize size over price or performance. Each is further subdivided into price ranges.
Every category features picks that, in our view, represent some of the best machines available now. In most cases, we've also included a few alternatives in case something about our main pick was a dealbreaker for you. With a little luck, you'll be able to find something tailored to your needs and budget.
Basic laptops
We recommend laptops at many prices throughout this article, but this section is where cost (and, perhaps, the bang/buck ratio) trumps all other concerns. That doesn’t mean these laptops will be terrible performers, but it does mean that a few things will remain constant: integrated graphics are the norm, mechanical 5400 RPM hard drives are standard, and 1366x768 displays are all but unavoidable.
Our primary goal here is to find systems that are inexpensive without being overly cheap—notebooks that don’t give up all of their desirable features just to hit the lowest price possible. We’re looking for good all-rounders with respect to performance and ports. To that end, these recommendations eschew the netbook-class processors and 2GB of RAM that some cheap laptops use. If you’re looking for cheaper lightweight or gaming laptops, we've got a few recommendations for you a bit later in the article.
Budget: $400 or less
The sub-$400 price range is primarily the domain of netbooks and larger computers that use netbook-class processors, usually from AMD. Computers this cheap are saddled with enough limitations and caveats that I'd recommend moving up to our "mid-range" selections if at all possible—build quality is going to be a major concern, especially if the laptop is traveling frequently or is heavily used, and the amount of power inside the bulky, plasticky chassis may leave you wanting if your needs are more strenuous than Web browsing, video streaming, or word processing. For those who need to save every dollar possible, however, this recommendation is for you.
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