What computers should i buy

Fees may apply. Some accessories and apps compatible with Windows 10 and 11 may not work including some antivirus and accessibility apps and performance may vary, even after switching out of S mode.

If you switch out of S mode, you can't switch back. Learn more at windows. Windows 11 Pro edition is not available in S mode. Apps, games and other content or subscriptions may be sold separately. Please check with each retailer for exact offers. Products may not be available in all markets. Displayed prices are current lowest prices offered by stated retailers and are subject to change. Prices are not offered by Microsoft unless stated.

Check with the device manufacturer or retailer. HDR and 4K functionality available with supported games, monitors, and graphics chips. To view individual review data, visit the retail sites listed for each PC. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network and Auto-Brightness disabled. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage, and other factors.

Testing consisted of full battery discharge during local video playback. WiFi and Bluetooth in airplane mode and Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in airplane mode and Auto-Brightness disabled.

Contact your service provider for details, compatibility, pricing, SIM card, and activation. See all specs and frequencies at surface. Availability of data plans for eSIM varies by market and by carrier. Testing consisted of full battery discharge with a mixture of active use and modern standby. The active use portion consists of 1 a web browsing test accessing 8 popular websites over multiple open tabs, 2 a productivity test utilizing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, and 3 a portion of time with the device in use with idle applications.

Tested with Windows Version All settings were default except screen brightness was set to nits with Auto-Brightness disabled. Wi-Fi was connected to a network. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September using preproduction software and preproduction Testing conducted by Microsoft in February using preproduction software and preproduction configurations of Surface Go 2. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage.

Learn more. Before you begin to look at laptops, you must figure out which operating system OS works best for you. Thinking through what software you need to run and on which operating systems that software runs will help you determine the hardware you need.

There are four major computer operating systems. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Here's an overview of each:. Once you know which operating system you want and have some idea of the software you're going to run, you can figure out the minimum hardware specifications you'll need. The first thing we suggest looking at is the processor, also referred to as the chip or the CPU.

Intel's main processors are the Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9. The Core i3 is the least powerful, the Core i9 is the most powerful. We usually drop the "Core" from the name because it gets repetitive. Within each of these chip lines, Intel uses cryptic strings of numbers and letters that give you more information about that chip's capabilities and when it came out.

Learning to decipher it will help you make better buying decisions. Here's Intel's guide to its model naming. Intel Core iU is how a laptop manufacturer's websites might list the type of processor. Let's break it down. The first numbers "10" refer to the generation; in this case it's a 10th-generation chip. The iU would be a ninth-generation chip, or one that's probably a year or so older. The next two or three numbers "" are related to performance. The higher these numbers are, the more powerful the chip is.

This is only true within that chip line, though. The i7 chip is always more powerful than the i5, and the difference is greater than the difference between any two chips in the same chip line.

The letter at the end of the chip name "U" in our example is Intel's designation for the chip's purpose. For laptops, the letters you'll see at the end are Y, U, and H. The only one you need to worry about are the Y series chips, which are optimized for battery life.

That's good if you're frequently away from a plug for long periods of time, but that added battery life comes at the expense of some performance.

The next two numbers don't have much impact on anything. Other letter designations include U for ultra-low power. Is there a huge difference between Intel and AMD chips? My experience, testing dozens of both every year, is that … it depends.

Generally speaking, an Intel i5 is indistinguishable from a Ryzen 5, outside of very specific benchmarks. They're similar when you're doing things like browsing the web or editing documents. The same goes for the Intel i7 and Ryzen 7, and the Intel i3 and the Ryzen 3. Graphics performance is the other area you'll notice a difference. In my testing, in both benchmarks and real work use, AMD's integrated graphics tend to perform better than Intel on graphics-intensive tasks—think editing video or playing games.

Intel's most recent series of chips have closed that gap significantly, but AMD still has an edge. You may benefit from buying an AMD machine if you're a video editor or gamer, but what you most likely want is a dedicated graphics card.

More on that in the GPU section below. If you're a typical user who runs a web browser, Microsoft's Office Suite, and perhaps even some photo editing software, we recommend a laptop with an Intel Core i5 eighth-generation or later processor.

If you can afford it, an Intel i7 chip makes a nice upgrade and will make your laptop feel snappier. The extra power often means shorter battery life, though, so you'll need to balance that with your needs. A gaming laptop, for instance, would use an i7 or i9 chip, but an i3 or i5 is usually fine for less demanding tasks. Likewise, for the average user the AMD Ryzen series will suffice, but the Ryzen makes a nice upgrade—again at the cost of battery life. If you compile software, edit video, or work with very large databases you're going to want more processing power than the rest of us.

I suggest an Intel i7 or Ryzen 7. You'll also want to load up on RAM, but we'll get to that in a minute. Chrome OS is built around Google's Chrome web browser and runs most software directly in the browser.

That means it doesn't need big, powerful Intel chips. That's the theory, at least. Here are my favorite Chromebooks. That series is powerful enough for most tasks and offers great battery life—a combination that's more difficult to find in Intel-powered Chromebooks. There are high-end Chromebooks with Intel i5 chips, and even some i7 models are out there, but unless you're really all in on Chrome OS you're better off buying a more capable Windows laptop.

The cheapest Chromebooks may use Intel's Celeron series processors. If your needs are excessively minimal, and you'll never do anything more than lightly browse the web, the Celerons will do. But if you're hoping to run Android apps or install Linux apps on your Chromebook, the Celeron processors will struggle and likely frustrate you.

Chromebooks use Chrome OS, an operating system developed by Google and whose user interface largely resembles the Chrome web browser. See the best Chromebooks in our ratings here. Chromebooks typically have smaller amounts of storage than other laptops, so consumers should be prepared to stream, instead of download, content like music and movies.

You need access to the internet to get the best work out of one of these machines, and store files in the cloud with services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive. Laptops known as 2-in-1s either have a keyboard that can be bent around the back of the display or a keyboard that can be detached entirely.

These are called convertibles and detachables, respectively. They may be useful if you want to use your laptop in bed while holding it like a tablet to stream video, say or if you want to prop up the laptop like a "tent" to more easily show off the display to other people nearby.

You may even find scrolling through photos or merely swiping around the web to be easier than using a mouse and keyboard. For some, a tablet can take the place of a laptop. See our tablet buying guide for detailed information about shopping for one. These machines are lightweight and highly portable. Their weight can vary between just less than a pound to about 1.

In our tests, their batteries can last more than 10 hours per charge. For office productivity tasks, you can add a keyboard to many of them. Desktops typically offer a better bang for your buck compared with laptops, delivering more power and performance per dollar spent. You may not need a ton of power if, say, you spend most of the day inside office productivity software, but they often cost less. Lastly, given the rise of video chatting, you may also need a standalone camera, since freestanding monitors typically don't come with one.

See our desktop ratings , and monitor ratings , available to CR members, for more information. Though they require a lot of room under or on top of your desk, full-sized desktops are the least expensive computers and the easiest to upgrade and repair. At less than half the size of full-sized desktops, compact or slim desktops are ideal if you lack space under your desk or if you plan to put the computer on your desk.

All-in-one desktop computers, also known as "all-in-ones," combine the computer and monitor. The components are tightly packed behind and underneath the display, making them difficult to upgrade or repair.

Meant to be space-savers, they're also designed to look less stodgy than traditional computers. The sky's the limit for gaming systems. You get the fastest processors, the most sophisticated graphics cards, multiple large hard drives, and lots of RAM. Cases are usually large and offer room for additional components like extra memory or dedicated sound cards. These tend to be quite expensive. Speed matters. Processors with multiple cores can process more data simultaneously, with four cores now increasingly common on laptops.

Our ratings say how many cores a laptop's processor has. Clock speed, measured in gigahertz GHz , along with the number of cores and other factors, determines how quickly a processor can process information. Many processors can up the speed a bit for a brief time to yield maximum performance. Generally, within a processor family, the higher the clock speed, the faster the processor. Clock speeds typically start at around 1 GHz for a mobile processor. Speeds can exceed 5 GHz for a desktop processor.

Power Consumption Another important factor when choosing a processor, especially for laptops: Lower power consumption equals longer battery life. If you're looking for a very basic or budget computer to browse the web, email, and work on Office documents, basically every processor on the market should be sufficient.

If you plan to watch high-resolution videos or play mainstream games, the Intel Core i5 and AMD Ryzen 5 line of processors should be your starting point. How Much Memory? The more memory a computer has, the faster it is, up to a point.

Memory is measured in gigabytes GB. On both desktops and laptops 8GB has become common, with 16GB or more found on higher-end devices. Unless you regularly have multiple large apps open at the same time, 8GB should be your target. Operating System Windows 10 should be easy to use for anyone who has used a previous version of Windows. Microsoft releases several Windows 10 updates free throughout the year, adding additional features, fixing bugs, etc.

Macs can be a little more expensive than comparable PCs, but they're less prone to most viruses and spyware in part because there are more Windows PCs out there than Macs, making them a bigger target for hackers , and Apple's support has been tops in our surveys.

The company's phone support is free for only 90 days, but you can get unlimited technical support through the Genius Bar at any Apple Store, though you should check ahead to make sure your local store is open and offering support. The latest version of macOS is called Big Sur and was released in the fall of Apple also releases several macOS updates free throughout the year. Graphics Adapter and Graphics Memory Also known as the video card, graphics processing unit GPU , or graphics card, this hardware is responsible for drawing what you see on your screen.

Graphics processing comes in two basic flavors: It can either be integrated into the same chip that's running the rest of the computer or it can run on a discrete piece of equipment. Most computers have integrated graphics. This has usually been the less expensive and lower-performing option—fine for most tasks but not for serious gaming.

Light video editing and gaming and all other typical computer tasks will do fine with integrated graphics. They are also the single largest performance boost you can give a computer over an identical computer with a hard drive. Hard Drives Also known as a hard disk, this type of drive uses a spinning hard disk and uses more power than a solid-state drive.

It is also slower overall. Hard-drive sizes are measured in gigabytes and terabytes, and commonly range from GB to more than 1TB. Speed is equally important and is measured in rpm revolutions per minute. A slow hard drive will take longer to start up the OS and programs, and complete tasks such as installing programs or scanning your hard drive for viruses. For best performance, get a desktop with at least a 7,rpm hard drive or a laptop with a 5,rpm hard drive.