There are a ton of laptops on the market at any given moment, and almost all of those models are available in multiple configurations to match your performance and budget needs. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with options when looking for a new laptop, it’s understandable. To help make things easier for you, here are some important things to consider when you start looking.

Price

. If the statistics that chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers hurl at us are correct, you’ll be holding onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a little to get better specs, do it. That stands whether you’re spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront and look to upgrade memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making easily upgradable components, so it’s best to get as good a laptop as you can afford from the start.

Generally, the more money you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design from higher-end materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of a laptop. I’d love to say $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming upwards of about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models at all price points to get more laptop features for less money.

Operating system

When it comes to price and variety (and, again, PC gaming), Windows laptops win. If you want MacOS, you’re getting a MacBook. While Apple’s MacBooks always top our best of the best list, the least expensive is the M1 MacBook Air at $999. It’s regularly discounted to $750 or $800, but if you’re looking for a cheap MacBook, you’ll have to consider the old refurbished ones.

Windows laptops can be found for as little as a few hundred bucks and come in all sorts of sizes and designs. Granted, we’d be hard-pressed to find a $200 laptop we’d give a full-throated recommendation to, but if you need a laptop for online shopping, email and word processing, they exist.

If you are on a tight budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows; make sure the apps you need have a Chrome, Android or Linux app before making the change. If you spend most of your time surfing the web, writing, streaming video or using cloud gaming services, they’re a good fit.

The size

You want to optimize pixel density; that is the number of pixels per inch that the screen can display. Although other factors contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) We recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch (ppi) as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows and macOS scale the display, you’re often better off at a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller — to fit more content in the view — on a low-resolution screen. That’s why a 4K, 14-inch screen might sound like an unnecessary overkill, but it might not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet.

If you need a laptop with relatively accurate color that displays the most colors possible or that supports HDR, you can’t simply trust the specs. Manufacturers often fail to provide the context necessary to understand what the definition they cite means. You can find a ton of detail about considerations for different types of screen uses in our monitor buying guides for general-purpose monitors, creators, gamers and HDR viewing.

The processor, aka the CPU, is the brains of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer an impressive selection of mobile processors. Making things trickier, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, like power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming convention will tell you what type is used. You can head to Intel’s or AMD’s sites for explanations so you get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Pictures

Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it is constrained by the limits of those. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are certain games and creative software that won’t run unless they get enough dGPU or VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other non-specialized apps will run fine on an iGPU, though.

For other power-hungry graphics needs, such as video editing, playback and streaming, design and more, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on the Xe-branded (or the older UHD Graphics branding) iGPU technology in its CPUs.

For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM (8GB is the absolute minimum). RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for the applications that are currently running, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slow. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which in conjunction with a slower disk can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, most laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is sold and cannot be upgraded.

Some PC makers will sell the memory and leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or get the full specifications of the laptop to confirm. Check the web for user experiences, because the slot may still be hard to get to, it may require non-standard or hard-to-get memory or other pitfalls.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives (SSDs) have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheap laptops often have slow drives. If the laptop only has 4GB or 8GB of RAM, it may end up switching to that drive and the system may slow down quickly while you’re working.