How to buy a laptop for your business

Why do I need a laptop?

What should I look for?

Processor
Intel's Pentium M, AMD's Turion 64 and Apple's PowerPC G4 processor offer business users the best balance between performance power, battery life and weight. For less demanding computing, an Intel Celeron or an AMD Sempron processor will do the trick.
Bare minimum: Regardless of what kind of processor you decide on, you'll need at least 1.73GHz of processing speed.

Memory:
You'll want enough memory to run a few applications at a time. The more memory you buy upfront, the longer your laptop will be able to handle current (and future) applications.
Bare minimum: 512MB.

Video card:
For most business users, video memory is one area where you can afford to cut corners. Unless your system will be doubling as a gaming machine, you don't need to shell out extra money for a high-end card with its own memory.
Bare minimum: An integrated graphics card that shares memory with the system chipset.

Hard drive:
Email archives, spreadsheets and Word documents add up. If you plan to carry music and video on your system, consider 80GB or more.
Bare minimum: 60GB; 5,400rpm.

Optical drive:
The least expensive laptops come with fixed drives that cannot be removed. A swappable drive bay offers more flexibility: You can easily pull out a CD-ROM drive and swap in a combo DVD/CD-RW drive (or even a second battery).
Bare minimum: If you're totally indifferent to the prospect of mobile movie watching, a CD-ROM drive will get the job done. But we strongly recommend upgrading to a DVD/CDRW combo drive, which will let you burn CDs and watch DVDs.

Screen size:
Depending on the type of work you do, you'll want to make sure your screen fits the job. Graphics and spreadsheet tasks call for larger screens while email requires very little space.
Bare minimum: 12-inch display.

Weight:
A few kg here, a few kg there -- carry your laptop around the airport for an afternoon and it all adds up. You may be tempted to get a larger notebook that seemingly offers more bang for the buck, but trust us: For the business user, less is more.
Ideal range: 1.5kg to 3kg

Battery:
Laptop batteries don't last as long as they should. Even the best-performing systems top out at about 6 hours and most last half as long.
Bare minimum: One Lithium-ion primary battery with at least 2 hours of battery life.

Networking:
Today's business demands online connectivity. All laptops come with an Ethernet connection and almost all come with built-in wireless connectivity. You'll want both. If work takes you away from both office and hot spot, you can buy a laptop with an integrated 3G card, which connects to a mobile data network--but that feature can be quite costly.
Bare minimum: Ethernet LAN connection and integrated wireless (preferably 802.11a/b/g) card.

Ports and connections:
The most sophisticated laptops feature advanced audio and video connections, such as digital media card readers, S-video outs for connecting to a TV, a DVI port for connecting to digital LCD monitors and a FireWire port for capturing and editing digital video. Unless you have multimedia aspirations, few of these are necessary for a business laptop.
Bare minimum: Two USB 2.0 ports; a VGA connector.