Decide what to buy | the Reevoo.com blog, featuring news on TVs, cameras, laptops, mp3 players & other gadgets, shopping tips and deals, reviews and more

It can be frustratingly confusing when shopping online as manufacturers like to use fancy words where it might be better to just say ‘portable’. The word ‘Qosmio’ sounds cool but it doesn’t tell you that Qosmio machines are the most powerful in Toshiba’s range of laptops.

So, here’s a breakdown of the Toshiba laptop ranges which should make it easier for you to identify the kind of laptop you’re looking for.

Equium
The Equium range offers laptops for everyday use around the house and out and about such as internet browsing and word processing.
Equium laptops are only available from PC World and Currys.
The U series come with small 13.3 inch screens and Vista Home Premium.
The A series come with a 15.4 inch screen but it is only the same resolution as the U series.
The P series machines have a larger chassis and screen at 17 inches and 1440×900.

View Toshiba Equium customer reviews on Reevoo.com

Portégé
The Portégé range is designed with portability in mind. The Portégés are lightweight, starting at only 1kg, and extremely thin. Some models come with solid state storage which means there are less moving parts and therefore less heat and less power being consumed. This helps to increase battery life, extending the machine’s portability even further. They are also the most stylish of the Toshiba laptops, and I dare say they were influenced by Apple’s Macbook Air. Because some Portégés come with Solid State hard drives, just like the Macbook Air, there’s less chance of damaging your data should you accidentally drop the machine.

View Toshiba Portégé customer reviews on Reevoo.com

Qosmio
These machines are for pure brute power gaming and media use. The top Qosmios come with 18.4 inch, HD ready screens, extremely fast quad core processors and dedicated nVidia graphics cards. Unsurprisingly they are considerably more expensive than other ranges. If you need an element of portability but can tolerate 4.4kg on your lap, then Qosmio is for you.

View Toshiba Qosmio customer reviews on Reevoo.com

Satellite
The Satellite series of laptops are mid-range machines, all equipped with either Intel or AMD Dual Core processors. For most every day, extended use, the Satellite range is perfectly suitable. The machines run Windows Vista Premium and come in a variety of sizes ranging from 13.3 inches to 17.1. As there are a wide variety of laptops in the Satellite range it is easy for you to pick which suits you best.

Optional features include:

A variety of graphics chip solutions – If you play any games consider the ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 equipped models.

Harman Kardon stereo speakers – Most people have MP3 players which means their laptops are used to store music. If this applies to you then Harman Kardon equipped speakers will give you the best sound quality.

Face Recognition – Some Satellite models come with a 0.3 or 1.3 megapixel built in webcam. Not only is this good for making Youtube videos or communicating online but you can also use them for security. If your face isn’t recognised you will get locked out of the system. Just be sure not to set it up just before shaving off a well established beard.

View Toshiba Satellite customer reviews on Reevoo.com

Mini Laptops
The Mini Laptop range are best described as ‘netbooks’. Tiny, with an 8.9 inch display, and only 1kg in weight, they’re built to travel with. They have a 3.5 hour battery life so are ideal if your needs are maximum portability internet access and document editing.
Everything in a Mini Laptop is designed around size so their processor, hard disk space and memory sizes are lower than in other Toshiba ranges. As with certain Portégé models, the Mini’s come equipped with solid state storage and are therefore reasonably durable.

Operating System - As with other manufacturers’ netbook laptops the Toshiba Mini series comes with either Windows XP or Linux. Windows XP is the version of Windows prior to Vista and most people should be familiar with it. Linux is a separate operating system and will not be compatible with your usual Windows software so make sure you take this into consideration when deciding what to buy.

View Toshiba Mini Laptop customer reviews on Reevoo.com

Laptops can be tricky things to purchase. If you want a larger hard drive or more RAM, how much more should you pay? Do you go for well established brands or cheaper newcomers?

Read on to find out what happened when we analysed 900 laptops to answer:
1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space or an extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
3. Who really makes the best laptops?
4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?

1. How much does a large screen cost vs. a small screen?
Strangely, the size of screen has very little to do with the price of a laptop. Check out the graph below which shows that 17” screens can vary from £235 to £2000! And quite often, 13” and 15” models are the same price as the larger 17” models.

So, when you come to choose a laptop, chose a size that’s right for you. If you want to be able to take it with you wherever you go, go for something that’s small and light but if you will be using your laptop for design work or to watch DVDs, then go for a larger screen size.

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2. How much does an extra 100GB of hard drive space cost, or an extra 100MB (1GB) of RAM cost?
It’s quite difficult to split out different features to determine how much they each add on to the price but – and here comes the science – by doing a regression across all the different laptops we know, using the price as the dependent variable and all key factors influencing price as the independent variables, we picked out the coefficient of the size of the hard drive and number of MB RAM to come up with the following:

• An extra 100GB of hard drive space typically costs around £100
• An extra 1000MB (1GB) of RAM costs £70
This isn’t always the case but we’ve noticed that it’s a general trend, using the methodology above.

Take a look at the table below which shows how brands like Sony and Toshiba pack in larger hard drives or more RAM and alter their prices accordingly.

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3. When I buy a Sony am I just paying for the brand or are they really better? Who really makes the best laptops?
Different brands excel at different things and focus on different parts of the market so it’s quite difficult to tell which brand is best overall. But we’ve looked at a few factors to help you out:

Customer score vs. price
We’ve looked at the correlation between the average selling price for each brand and their customer score to see if those which impress on performance charge more for their products.
This throws up some interesting results:

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As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

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As you can see there is some degree of positive correlation between average selling price and average score by brand. So as a broad brush statement, we could say:
Brands that are more expensive tend to get more highly rated by consumers

More importantly however, there are some brands that have significantly higher average scores than others. Namely,
• Asus may not be as well known as some of their illustrious competitors, but their low end products (average selling price of c.£300) are consistently highly rated
• Dell are the next best key manufacturer with a strong mid-range offer
• Sony laptops are also highly rated, but at a price! People are prepared to pay more to own a Sony but they seem to perform well and impress consumers.

Brands and features
Different types of laptops suit different types of people, so we’ve looked at how brands perform in a number of key features and picked out the top performers in each feature. We’ve also included the average score across the feature so that you can see how well the top-scoring brand did:

• Asus do well to outperform the others in battery life, size and weight and overall rating
• Dell win the award for the best designed laptops
• Sony do best in the performance category and;
• Acer get the prize for the best value for money

4. Should I buy a new model or buy an older model for a cheaper price?
Some shoppers can’t resist getting the latest gadget or gizmo but how much could they save if they waited a few weeks?

Prices for most products will vary according to different retailers and different special offers at launch whereas others will keep their price for years on end – games consoles tend to follow this trend as manufacturers make the real money on games and accessories.

We’ve analysed price trend in thousands of electricals to give you an idea of what a typical price decay curve looks like:

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As you can see it doesn’t take long for retailers to start knocking the price of new products! Laptops follow a pretty similar path to other electricals, we’ve included TVs and digital cameras here and as you can see:
• if you buy a laptop around 3 months after it has launched, it will be around 20% cheaper than the launch price
• For most laptop purchases, that’s a saving of nearly £100!

However, after 4 months, prices flatten out so that anything older than 4 months will not save you any more money. You will just end up buying a machine that may have been built using older technology, and is more likely to be replaced with a newer version soon (which impacts resell value, but more importantly will probably leave you pretty annoyed)

So there are all the facts. Hopefully you’ll know what to look out for when you go to buy a laptop but if you’re still having problems, drop us an email at feedback@reevoo.com.

(All data based on H2 2008 figures)