Are You Buying a New Laptop?

Right now is the best time to do it in a while.

It's late May, and Intel has just released their new "Santa Rosa" Core-2 Duo chipset which means all the other, slightly-earlier-but-still-really-good Intel Core-2-Duo's are seeing a big price bump. And there is a huge glut in the market for affordable notebooks because of big Vista promotions. Laptops that a year ago would have cost US$1400 are now more around $600.

But, with Vista, don't you need all the power you can afford to run it? Probably. My suggestion is to find a notebook maker who is still selling Windows XP, if you're worried about driver support for your printers, copiers, etc. Win XP is still really solid in my mind and Vista's appeal is really just in the eye candy, from what a lot of what I've read.

OK, so now is a good time to buy a laptop, but which one? It almost goes without saying that a laptop is a very personal thing and there are a lot of different needs and laptops out there that handle those needs better than others. I've broken it down into four categories of buyers that make the most sense

One: Casual user. Just some surfing, email, a little bit of video games or some random photo or video editing. Occasional trips out of the house.
Two: Business: Running lots of programs concurrently, heavy use of processor and memory, on-the-go a lot..
Three: Professional. Heavy processor use: photoshop, video editing, website coding, etc.
Four: Mobile: Needs to be small, fast and have great battery life/