5 things to consider when buying a laptop, from a pro laptop reviewer

As the computing editor at Tom's Guide, readers often send me questions about what to look for in a new laptop or how to find the right machine for their needs. I thought it might save some time to collect my favorite tips for buying a laptop in one place.

I've been reviewing laptops for nearly 20 years, so I've had my hands on hundreds of models. I've carried them on airplanes, to coffee shops, trade shows, and just about anywhere else you can imagine.

With that in mind, here's the five things you need to consider when buying the best laptop for your needs.

Find your most comfortable screen size

The #1 thing I've learned from reviewing laptops for a living is that if I'm not comfortable using a laptop, I'm going to find excuses not to use it.

That's why my top recommendation is to try a few different sizes and shapes of laptop before you buy, either by trying the laptops of colleagues, friends and family or by going to your local electronics retailer and trying a few different floor models.

See, the size of a laptop determines some very important details: how big the screen is, how heavy the laptop is and how large of a keyboard you get. Together they significantly influence how comfortable you'll be on the laptop, and thus how happy you will be using it.

For example, I personally prefer a larger laptop with at least a 15-inch screen (like the 15-inch MacBook Air M4) because I'm a big guy with big hands, so I sit farther away from the screen than most and appreciate having a spacious keyboard. I also don't mind the added weight that tends to come with bigger laptops, though I really love a big-screen laptop that's ultra-light like the LG Gram 17.

But if you're more petite or simply prefer a smaller ultraportable, you could be looking at options like the 13-inch MacBook Air M4 or the Dell XPS 13 instead.

If you try just a few different sizes and brands you can get a better sense what size of laptop is the most comfortable for you to work with, and that will help you buy the perfect laptop for your needs.

Dell XPS 13: was $1,499 now $1,459 at Best Buy

This Dell XPS 13 (2024) with a Snapdragon X Elite chip boasts incredible performance in a well-crafted, lightweight design, and its bright, 13.4-inch (2880 x 1800) OLED touchscreen will make visuals shine.

View Deal

Get the ports you need

It's hardly the most exciting part of buying a laptop, but thinking about which ports you'll need ahead of time is a key part of making sure you don't regret your purchase months down the line.

These days almost every laptop you buy will come with at least two USB-C ports, and many will also sport a headphone jack — but not all. So if you know you want to be able to plug in a pair of cans instead of relying on Bluetooth, make sure the laptop you're buying has an audio port.

Likewise, if you want to use accessories like an external drive or a trackball mouse with your laptop you'll want to make sure it has enough of the right kinds of USB ports to support everything you want to do with it. These days most new accessories connect via USB-C ports (which look like a small oval), but older stuff tends to connect via USB-A ports (which looks like a rectangle).

If you somehow still end up not having enough ports, you can often buy an adapter or USB hub to get around that limitation, but making sure you have enough before you buy your laptop can go a long way towards saving you serious headaches later.

Get as much battery life as you can afford

Laptops are lasting longer than ever these days, and unless you're buying a gaming laptop you have good reason to expect at least eight solid hours of use out of the best MacBooks and best Windows laptops on the market today.

I know because here at Tom's Guide we put each laptop we review through a gauntlet of performance tests, including a series of battery rundown tests that tasks the laptop with endlessly surfing the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. We factor the results into our final score and use them to compile our regularly updated list of the best laptops for battery life, which is worth skimming as you're shopping.

Because there's few worse feelings, as a laptop owner, than being in the middle of something and realizing your laptop is about to die — and you're nowhere near a charger.

These aren't the only laptops you should consider, just some of the longest-lasting we've ever tested. You can expect similar battery life from other laptops packing either Apple silicon (aka the company's M-series chips) or one of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chipsets.

However, there is one key detail about our battery test results that you should keep in mind. We set the screen brightness very dim for consistency's sake, so you shouldn't expect a laptop out in the wild to last as long as they do in our testing lab — doing things like cranking up the brightness, watching movies and running apps will all increase the drain on your battery.

Get something as light as you can

I've been carrying and working from a laptop all day for decades, and I can tell you from experience that buying as light as possible up front pays big dividends down the road.

So unless you're buying a gaming laptop, I heartily recommend you prioritize the weight of the laptop you're buying as seriously as you value battery life and performance.

In my experience, anything below four pounds or so is fairly easy for most adults to carry for hours. Once you start to creep up above the four-pound mark, however, you're starting to get into more bulky creator-oriented laptops (as well as light gaming laptops) that can start to weigh heavy on your back and shoulders after a day of lugging them around.

Anything above five pounds is going to wreak havoc on your back if you try to lug it around in a bag all day, so I recommend you keep really big laptops on a desk as often as possible.

If you don't need a lot of power and prize light weight, I heartily recommend you consider either a MacBook Air or one of Lenovo's super-light ultraportables like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition.

Apple MacBook Air M4 (15-inch): was $1,399 now $1,199 at Amazon

This is easily one of the best big-screen laptops you can get, with a slim, sleek construction, plenty of performance and insane power efficiency. And now, you can get $200 off this fantastic all-in-one.

View Deal

Don't skimp on power

You tend to get what you pay for when buying a laptop, so my final tip is to make sure you don't spend too little (or too much) on your next notebook.

The best budget laptops transcend their cheap, dated components to offer a decent experience, but in general if you see a laptop deal that seems too good to be true, it probably is — and if you skimp on power out of the gate to save money, you're going to regret it in a few years when your laptop slows to a crawl.

In general, if you're buying a MacBook you want something with at least an Apple M2 chip or later onboard, though you can get by with the ancient M1 if you're not doing much other than emails and browsing the web.

If you want a Windows laptop, you're basically stuck with Windows 11 at this point and I generally recommend you get anything old enough to still be on Windows 10. Also, try to stay away from anything with less than a fairly new Intel Core i5 (or AMD Ryzen 5) CPU, 8GB of RAM and at least 256GB of storage.

Perversely, if you're shopping for a Chromebook I generally recommend trying to avoid spending too much on premium components. ChromeOS relies on an active Internet connection to function and doesn't require much in the way of beefy components, so spending a lot of money on a fancy Chromebook with a speedy CPU and loads of RAM and storage can be a real waste.

Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

More from Tom's Guide

• Windows 10 will die this fall — here's how to survive
• Nvidia RTX 50 SUPER GPUs may arrive sooner than you think — even before CES 2026
• I just tried Alienware’s new 18-inch RTX 5090 gaming laptop — and it’s ridiculous in the best way possible