It’s angle adjustable, allowing it to act as a laptop stand. If you really need to read/write discs we strongly recommend leaving this off the wish list for your laptop and buying an external DVD drive. Storage (SSD): As important as the speed of your CPU is the performance of your storage drive. This laptop delivers solid performance for basic music production tasks. We broke down each of our five use cases, finding the memory demands for both basic and heavy use, and matched that to common allotments of RAM. Single audio or video streams from Spotify or YouTube used less than 3GB of memory (2,747 MB and 2,532 MB, respectively), and you had to bump that up to 4 or more simultaneous streams to get above the 3GB mark. Key takeaway: You can do a lot of the basics with only 4GB of memory, but if you need to work with extremely large files, you’ll want to bump up to 8GB or more. If you need a Chromebook, look for one with at least 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage if this is a secondary laptop, if it’s a primary laptop we’d recommend 8GB of RAM and an SSD rather than eMMC flash memory.

If it’s just to cut some of the unnecessary stuff around family videos to share with your Mom, then 4GB will be just about enough for this job. The answer to the question of how much RAM you need will always come back to what you want to do with your laptop. On the Alienware we checked back in on GTA V and found everything running smoothly. Different software has varied system requirements; knowing these helps target laptops capable of running essential applications smoothly. Those numbers held fairly steady throughout actual gameplay, so there’s no appreciable difference between running the game and playing the game that we could see. For this we used Grand Theft Auto V. It’s not the newest game on the market, but it’s still relatively demanding, requiring a decent graphics card to handle all the visuals. It’s barely heavier or thicker, and I got to remove so many accessories from my travel bag that I think I’m actually coming out ahead. A purpose made key is all it takes to unlock the grip claws, remove the tablet and fit in another.

Display: The more pixels you have, the more content you can fit on-screen, and the sharper it will look. Touch Screen: If you’re buying a regular clamshell laptop, rather than a 2-in-1, you won’t get much benefit from a touch screen and you will get 1 to 2 hours less battery life. On the downside its battery life fell by about an hour, but at 10 hours and 57 minutes in our Laptop Mag battery test, it’s still plenty to get you through at least a day or two of use. AMD Ryzen 7000: The Ryzen 7000 chips from AMD are just rolling out now, so we are still waiting to get laptops with them in our labs for texting, but the company claims we can expect a roughly 78% boost to CPU performance at the top end. Windows 11 laptops are great for students, researchers, and business users, and they’re still the only gaming laptops anyone should consider. Sadly, some budget laptops still have 1366 x 768 displays, but if you can afford it, we recommend paying extra for a panel that runs at 1920 x 1080, also known as Full HD or 1080p. Higher-end laptops have screens that are 2560 x 1600, 3200 x 1800, or even 3840 x 2160 (4K), which all look sharp but consume more power, lowering your battery life.

Still a cool idea! If you have a long flight, or want a weekend away without a charger, the Galaxy Tab S9 FE Plus is your best tablet option. Laptops come in a wide variety of sizes, features, and prices, making choosing the best laptop a challenge. That’s what the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet is all about, and right now it’s on sale for just $55 – that’s a whopping 45 percent off its original price of $100, making it one of the best-value tablet buys this year. Unlike your hard drive, however, the memory used for RAM is also volatile, meaning that it only holds onto that data while the chip is powered, so it’s not designed to hold information long term. ” It’s one of the most frequent questions asked by anyone buying or upgrading a desktop or laptop, and while there are some common insights that techies usually share, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and very little of the advice you do see has any real testing to back it up.