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Dell sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models are available in multiple configurations to suit your performance needs and budget. If you need help finding the right Dell laptop, we can help. Here are the main considerations to keep in mind when shopping for a new laptop.
price
The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics given to us by chip maker Intel and PC makers are correct, you’ll be keeping your next laptop for at least three years. If you can increase your budget a little to get better specs, do so. This applies whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront in order to upgrade memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradeable, so again, it’s best to get as much of your laptop’s capabilities as possible from the start.
In general, the more you spend, the better the laptop. This could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer screen, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design made of higher-quality materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things increase the cost of the laptop. I’d like to say that $500 would get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks ranges between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming runs around $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop capacity for less. Like other sellers, Dell runs ongoing sales on laptops on its site.
measuring
If you’ll be taking your laptop with you to class, work, or to your local coffee shop most mornings, you’ll want a smaller, lighter laptop — something with a 13-inch or 14-inch screen. If you’re buying a laptop for your home or business and don’t plan to travel with it with any great frequency, it may be worth your while to get a larger 15-inch, 16-inch, or even 17-inch screen that gives you more room to work, play, and multitask.
an offer
When deciding on a display, there are many considerations: how much you need to display (which surprisingly has more to do with resolution than screen size), the types of content you’ll be watching, and whether you’ll use it for gaming or creative endeavors.
You really want to optimize the pixel density; That is, the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although there are other factors that contribute to clarity, a higher pixel density usually means sharper display of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen on… DPI calculator If you don’t want to do the math, and you can also see what calculations you need to do there.) We recommend a raster spacing of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.
Because of the way Windows can change screen size, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you think. You can always make things larger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller—to fit more content in the display—on a low-resolution screen. That’s why a 14-inch 4K display may seem like unnecessary overkill, but it may not be if you need, say, to display a wide spreadsheet.
Text and image edges can appear blurry on a lower resolution screen. Look for a Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels at a minimum — or 1,920 x 1,200 pixels on laptops with 16:10 aspect ratios, which is taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and provides more vertical screen real estate for working without significantly increasing space. A Quad HD resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels (2560 x 1600 on a 16:10 display) will result in sharper text and images and will likely be sufficient on a 13- or 14-inch laptop screen — you don’t necessarily need a 4K display.
Processor
The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of your laptop. Intel and AMD are the two main CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with their respective companies ARM-based Snapdragon. Both Intel and AMD offer an amazing range of mobile processors. Making matters more complicated, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know which type is used. You can go to Intel or AMD Explanation sites until you get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor and the more cores it has, the better the performance.
Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with the CPU architecture, Arm vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based MacBooks Copilot Plus PCs We’ve tested better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.
Graphics
The graphics processor, or GPU, does all the work of driving the display and creating what’s displayed, as well as accelerating a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated or discrete. As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that communicates with it directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.
Because the iGPU partitions space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by those limits. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but it doesn’t perform as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative programs that won’t launch unless the dGPU detects enough VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other non-specialized applications will run fine on the iGPU.
For more power-hungry graphics needs, such as video editing, STEM and design applications as well as gaming, you’ll need a dGPU; There are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on its Xe-branded iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics brand) in its CPUs.
memory
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with a slower disk, can provide a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. In addition, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.
Some computer makers solder the memory and leave an internal slot empty to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or find the full laptop specifications online to confirm. Check user experiences on the web, as the slot may be difficult to access, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other risks, including voiding your warranty.
storage
You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a huge difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheap laptops usually have slower drives. If your laptop only has 8GB of RAM, you may end up switching to that drive, and the system may slow down quickly while you work.
Get what you can afford, and if you need to use a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two in the future, or use cloud storage to support a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: we don’t recommend using an SSD with less than 512GB unless you like uninstalling games every time you want to launch a new one.