We are often asked what laptop would be best for my needs. This question really needs to be answered by buyer. It depends upon your needs and what applications you are going to be running on the laptop.

Some general guidelines for the various things people do with their laptop and what hardware is needed follows:

Word Processing requires minimal RAM and HD and CPU. You can't type faster than a Pentium 90 and even an older $200 Pentium 2 laptop is fine for word processing.

E-mail requires the minimal amount of CPU speed, RAM etc. The speed of the connection is more important, but still does not matter much if you are only sending text messages back and forth. Even a 28.8 modem works fine for e-mail.

Web browsing works fine one even a Pentium 2 laptop with 64MB RAM. 128MB is preferred and is fine for most situations. Again the type of connection to the Internet is more important than the hardware. DSL or Cable Modem are far faster than a modem.

Excel requires minimal CPU, RAM and HD unless you are a power Excel user with huge spreadsheets then you might need lots of RAM, a fast CPU and a big Hard Drive.

Music is again does not require much in the way of CPU or processor, but if you have a lot of songs a large Hard Drive (at least 20GB is ok and 40GB is better).

Photography might require both a fast CPU, lots of RAM and lots of Hard Drive Storage. If you are using an intense application to edit the photos and take it very serious look at the software's requirements. If you take thousands of photos then you would need a large Hard Drive (20GB minimum, 40GB preferred). You might even consider and external Hard Drive for extra storage and would want a CDRW to burn the photos.

If you are a gamer, then all bets are off, depending upon which game you play. If you use the latest games then a very fast CPU, a graphics chip and as much as 2GB RAM might be needed.

If you are in doubt about what your applications need then go to the software vendors website and check out the Minimum Systems Requirements. That will show you the needed CPU, RAM, HD space and any other special requirement the specific application might require.