How to buy your perfect laptop
Before you jump into the reviews, take advantage of the detail packed into the feature table on p70 and the graphs on p84
The core hardware
Pareto’s principle applies: 80% of users should be satisfied by any recent Intel Core or AMD Ryzen processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. That’s enough for a snappy system. If you need more power, choose a high-end Ryzen chip or a 12th generation Intel Core i7 with as many performance cores (P-cores) as possible. Our feature table provides a detailed breakdown.
Two computers with the same chip won’t necessarily perform identically. CPUs need to be kept cool to achieve their top performance, so a laptop with a spacious case and powerful internal fans will tend to run faster than one that’s designed to be as thin and light as possible.
Another variable is the speed of the SSD. These vary considerably, and while choosing a Gen4 rather than Gen3 SSD is a good rule of thumb, our selection of benchmarks reveals each laptop’s bottlenecks.
Graphics and screen
If you want to play games, or use apps that take advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA cores, then a GeForce card will make a huge difference. The integrated graphics built into these laptops are fine for older, less demanding games, though.
Don’t neglect the quality of the screen. A high native resolution makes text and images look crisp and sharp, while a screen with a wide colour gamut ensures that images and movies look like the creators intended.
Touch and tablet mode
For most practical purposes you don’t need a touchscreen, but it’s still a welcome addition. Stylus support can be helpful, too, if you want to annotate web pages and documents; the Samsung Galaxy Book2 360
Pro even comes with a stylus in the box.
Portability and battery life
Portability normally comes at the expense of something. If you want a laptop with a tiny chassis, that puts a limit on how big the screen and keyboard can be. If you want one that’s as thin as possible, that’s liable to affect performance, for reasons we’ve noted above. It’s a game of trade-offs.
Ports and connectivity
Over time, one connector has come to rule them all: USB-C. This will support a certain standard of USB, with
USB 4 the fastest (40Gbits/sec), followed by the rarely seen USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gbits/sec), USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbits/sec), USB 3.2 Gen1 (5Gbits/sec) and old USB 2 (480Mbits/sec). Some USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbits/sec) as well. Aside from data transfer, most USB-C ports also support power delivery and connect to a monitor.
However, it’s still useful to have at least one USB-A port. Likewise, we appreciate HDMI outputs, microSD card slots and a physical Ethernet connection. Some older laptops still rely on Wi-Fi 5 rather than Wi-Fi 6, while the faster and more reliable Wi-Fi 6E is now commonplace on high-end machines.
Which OS?
When you’ve chosen your laptop, you may be offered the choice of Windows 10 or Windows 11. Support for Windows 10 ends in 2025 so you may decide to take the plunge now rather than wait. All the laptops here that ship with Windows 10 automatically offered an upgrade to 11 soon after we booted them.
You also need to decide between Home and Professional editions. If you’re buying for personal use you might well decide to save some money and stick with the Home edition, but Professional does have some notable benefits. For one, it includes BitLocker, which allows you to fully encrypt your device, as well as the Hyper-V virtualisation engine.
Repairability, reliability and support
When managing a fleet of laptops, it isn’t a question of if laptops go wrong, but when. That’s why we place particular emphasis on repairability in this month’s group test: we want a machine where it’s easy for an IT team to rip off the rear of the chassis and then replace the RAM or storage if required. This isn’t something we can easily put in a feature table, so we cover it in reviews wherever we can.
We’ve included reliability and support scores for the big laptop manufacturers. This is based on feedback from thousands of PC Pro readers in our annual survey. You can see a summary of the results in the feature table on p70 and view the details in issue 338, p26.
A laptop with a spacious case and powerful internal fans will run faster than one that’s designed to be as thin and light as possible
Sustainability
Most (but not all) laptops from big-name manufacturers have an EPEAT ( epeat.net) rating to indicate their sustainability, based upon criteria such as use of recycled plastics, avoidance of certain elements and their carbon footprint. We print the ratings in the feature table. In addition, we indicate if manufacturers have gained the far harder TCO certification ( tcocertified.com).