We are less than two weeks away from Black Friday and I’m also in the market for a laptop for my wife.  That being the case, I’ve been looking at what is out there in terms of computers and just wanted to talk about some things “under the hood.”

Name Brands – name brands dictate what the outside of a computer will look like, but the guts of computers are basically the same.  Computer companies like Dell buy parts in bulk so HP and Dell could be putting the same parts in their computers.

Hard Drive – they are actually putting 500GB hard drives in laptops now – that is huge compared to 5 years ago.  The thing to look at when deciding on hard drives is rotations per minute (RPM).  The faster a hard drive spins, the better it will perform and more power it will use.  So a 5400rpm hard drive theoretically will not perform as good as a 7200rpm hard drive.  Solid State Drives (SSD) are another type of hard drive with no moving parts.  The lack of moving parts reduces power consumption, heat and most importantly increases speed.  SSDs are still on the expensive and small side though.  Prices will come down in the coming months/years.

RAM – the more the better.  RAM (random access memory) is where your computer gets and stores temporary instructions.  Additionally, some systems have built-in video cards meaning your video (the speed you see) could use some of your RAM.  4GB on consumer systems is not out of the ordinary now – 512MB used to be more than enough.  If possible, max out the RAM when you buy and go for a video card with dedicated memory (512MB is still good for video cards).  There are so many different types of RAM, I wouldn’t even try to cover each one.  Matching RAM speed with bus speed is the main goal.

Processor – of course this plays an integral role in how fast a computer operates.  Processors go from Intel Celeron (slow/budget) to dual core (the most common processor at this time) to quad core (think 4 processors in one) models.  All these processors come in various speeds – 2.0GHz or so seems to be the sweet spot right now for a performance/price balance.

Bus – think of the bus as a street that connects all your components.  Would you rather have a street (667MHz bus), a road (800MHz bus) or a highway (1066MHz bus)?  A computer with a front-side bus running at 800MHz and RAM running at 667MHz would kind of defeat the purpose right?

Like always, some readers already know all this information and more, but some don’t.  Wal-Mart has already sold a laptop for $300 and similar deals will be all over the place this holiday season.  Matching budget, future usage and the actual hardware is what the goal should be, but sometimes cheap prices trump all.  Most people don’t need, or will never use, the expensive systems, but will not be totally be happy with the cheapest computer either.  Since there are so many computer configurations out there, it is helpful to know what is really being sold.

Happy shopping!