How to Find YOUR Perfect Laptop (Without Understanding the Technical Details)

Finding a new laptop is difficult, right?

The dreaded hunt to find a new laptop. We've all been here. You need one for school, work, or simply upgrading from something older, so you start browsing online just like with any other purchase. But then you quickly realise something:

Finding a laptop is REALLY confusing.

Suddenly you're hit with terms like processor, graphics card, RAM, SSD, refresh rate — words you might've heard before but don't fully understand. And even if you do know what each part means, that alone isn't enough. To find the right laptop for you, you need to understand how each of these parts affects your individual use case.

• Do I really need a top-tier processor for office work?
• If I want to play a few AA games, is it worth paying hundreds more for a super high-end GPU?

The truth is: there is no one perfect laptop — only laptops that work well based on your own personal needs and your budget.

So, to make this hunt more pleasant, I've created a simple 2-step framework that takes you from “I need a laptop” to “I know exactly what specs I need”, using a simple yet effective research strategy that doesn't involve understanding technical jargon at all. Ready?

Step 1 — Narrowing down the question

First, you need to decide what you're looking for in a laptop. Just saying “I need a laptop, my budget is X” will leave you extremely overwhelmed when trying to pick a single option out of hundreds, because that question is too broad.

What we want to do is ask a series of questions to make this broad question narrower and narrower. This limits the number of laptops we look into, and therefore makes it much easier to pick one.

I like to break laptop use-cases into the following levels:

1. 1

   Recreational & entertainment

   Browsing social media, Netflix, writing documents, shopping, emailing.

2. 2

   Office / school work

   Data visualisation, basic analysis, coding, Excel, Power BI, research, writing with formatting.

3. 3

   Gaming

   Playing double- and triple-A games with moderate to intense graphics.

4. 4

   Content creation

   Video editing, photo editing, 3D rendering, machine-learning development, heavy workloads.

These levels help because higher levels almost always cover lower ones. For example, a laptop that's good for gaming will handle school work easily.

For each of these levels, there are some questions you'll need to answer:

Recreational + office/school work

(These require similar performance.)

• Will you be doing complex tasks like data visualisation, data analysis or heavy coding?
• Which apps will you use? Do they have recommended hardware requirements?
• Will you multitask heavily (many apps and tabs open)?

Gaming

• Which games do you want to play?
• What are their recommended hardware requirements?
• How many games do you plan to install? Are they large (50GB+)?
• Will you stream gameplay?
• Do you care about a high refresh rate (120Hz+)?

Content creation

• Which professional apps will you use (Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, etc.)? Online/casual tools like Canva don't belong here.
• What are the recommended specs for those apps?
• Will your files be stored externally or internally?
• Do you need an SD card slot or other specialised ports?
• Are your file sizes large?
• How important is colour accuracy?

From these questions, you should now know

• The apps/games you'll run, plus their recommended specs
• Whether your media and games need lots of storage
• If you'll store files externally
• Whether you need a webcam
• Whether you'll multitask heavily
• If refresh rate or colour accuracy matters

Now you can use this information to guide decisions about performance, storage, ports and display. You can also decide on your preferred form factor and the maximum budget you're willing to spend.

Common form factors (based on screen size)

• Ultra-portable: under 14 inches (lightest)
• Standard: 14 to 15 inches
• Large: 16 inches+ (heaviest)

My questionnaire example (as a CompSci student + video creator)

Recreational / office / school work

• Yes — heavier tasks: light data analysis and lots of coding.
• Using Visual Studio Code (recommended: 8GB RAM, SSD).
• Will multitask with many apps open.

Gaming

A few games at recommended specs:

Don't mind a low refresh-rate display.

Content creation

• Storing video files internally.
• No SD card reader needed (exporting via USB).
• Files are large.
• Colour accuracy is not crucial.

Preferred OS: Windows 11 · Preferred size: Standard · Budget: £1,500

Step 2 — Building your own “ideal laptop” profile

From Step 1, you should now have lists of processors, graphics cards, RAM amounts, storage sizes, SSD vs HDD, display needs, ports and form factor.

To get your ideal laptop profile, simply take the largest value from each list. For example:

• For RAM, choose the highest amount listed.
• For storage, choose the largest amount listed.

Two important exceptions

• Don't go below 16GB RAM — anything lower will feel slow and laggy.
• Don't go below 512GB storage unless you rely heavily on cloud storage.
• If an SSD is an option, always choose SSD over HDD — it's much faster for opening apps and games and transferring files.

How can I compare processors and graphics cards?

There's actually a very easy way to do this without diving deep into the complicated architecture of each chip: just compare benchmark scores, which quantify how powerful a processor or graphics card is.

I'd recommend using NanoReview CPU Compare and NanoReview GPU Compare. For processors, the important benchmark is the Cinebench R23 score; for GPUs, it's the Steel Nomad Lite score. Higher is better for both. An even simpler way is to just ask AI or Google — if you trust AI-generated answers, that is.

If you have no GPUs in your list, you most likely only need a laptop for recreational/office/school work — your processor will have a built-in graphics card, which will be more than fine for that workload. For gaming and content creation, I'd highly recommend a dedicated graphics card. And if you don't need special ports like an SD card reader, then just USB-A and USB-C or Thunderbolt will be fine.

My ideal laptop profile example

Now you know the exact specs you're looking for in a laptop — and why!

Bonus — finding the needle in the haystack

Now you know exactly what to look for, but that's only half the battle. There are still hundreds of sellers, reviews and blogs to sift through to find that one laptop, and that's time-consuming.

This is why I like to use a recommendation tool to cut down the process. A recommendation tool uses your needs to suggest 3–5 laptops that best match your personal use case, making it easier to pick an option and a lot less overwhelming.

One suggestion is Microsoft's recommendation tool. It has a simple form and recommends Windows laptops that match your needs. However, it only recommends Windows laptops, so it's a little biased. You also can't specify a budget or your local currency, so if it recommends something out of budget (or not in your currency) you'll need to do more digging.

For this reason, I prefer the Plample laptop finder. It works just like Microsoft's, but you can specify your budget and local currency across a wider range of countries. It also recommends Windows, Mac and Chrome laptops, so there's no bias toward a particular brand.

Through Plample, I'd recommend the ASUS ROG Strix G16 — Intel i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB storage and an RTX 4080. It's perfectly aligned with my ideal profile (the graphics card is even more powerful!), and it connected me to buy it on Amazon for £1,250 — within my budget.

Closing

Thank you for taking the time to read! I hope this helps anyone who feels lost choosing a new laptop. If you try this 2-step method and build your own Ideal Laptop Profile, I'd love to hear how it went — did you end up buying a laptop through it?

Happy laptop hunting :)