How Does a Business Laptop Differ?

Having a business laptop computer today is a must if you want to have the flexibility to be able to work from anyway and still keep your finger on the pulse of your business.

I have often wondered about the time we lose travelling to and from work, time which could be better spent working for your business, a business laptop notebook gives you this option rather than having to then spend the time working when you get home.

There seems to be many common misconceptions when people or companies mention a business laptop after all what is the difference between a home or business laptop ?

I see the market as having 3 distinct types of laptops.

The approximate specs and uses ..

A basic model which is suitable for music, internet browsing, word processing and other general small applications.

• Usually a single core processor or a slower, older dual core processor model.
• 100gb hard drive
• 2gb of RAM
• Shared memory basic graphics card

The business laptop notebook , not only suitable for email, browsing etc, but also Office applications and databases.

• It should have a decent dual core processor such as Intel’s i5
• 500gb hard drive
• 3gb of RAM
• Shared memory graphics card

Gaming laptop; this is generally the most powerful of the laptops which is not surprising as generally games are considered the most processor and graphics intensive applications around.

• Should have a similar processor to a business laptop .
• 500gb plus hard drive.
• 3gb of RAM
• Dedicated memory graphics card

Other things you may want to consider when looking for a business laptop are..

How quickly will it be out of date? Of course you buy a laptop today and the manufacturers will bring out a newer model tomorrow, but behind the new flashy case what actually changes?

Computer technology seems to come along in small steps and bounds, one year there will be lots of updates to processors and faster hard drive, and then it will go quiet for a while, I think currently we are in that now, so a new hi-spec laptop today should be good at least 2 years and easily usable for 4.

How durable is it? Durability is a big thing for a business laptop as they usually take more abuse than personal computers, makes I have personally found to be very robust include Toshiba, HP and in particular IBM as they come covered in a very resistant rubbery covering.

What’s the battery life? What is the point in having a laptop if the battery lasts less than an hour? Factors that place a big drain on batteries include larger screens, inadequate amounts of RAM so the computer hard to use the page file on the hard drive.

Also worth checking if the laptop manufacturer can provide heavy duty/long life alternative batteries.

How heavy is it? A laptop may not feel heavy when you lift it up for a few seconds, but once its in a padded carry bag with its mains adapter and everything else you need to carry around it will soon get heavy when carried for any length of time.

There is a whole range of Quad core laptops on the horizon, but currently this seems to detract from one of the main purposes of a laptop, that being the mobility due to poor battery life.

Another downside to Quad core machines is the lack of application support, that meaning if an application is not compatible with multi-threading it will only use a single core from a multi-core processor, The Office 2003 suite being a good example of this.

If you need something with more graphic power then maybe this type of laptop is not for you – check our pages on gaming laptops which offer this.

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