When recommending laptops to friends and family, what are your minimum specs when searching?

Generally speaking, when searching for laptops for friends and family, I tend to stick to a set of minimum specs, almost like a laptop bible.

I personally try to get a laptop with the following (minimum) specs:

• 2.0GHz processor or above
• 4GB RAM or above
• 500GB HDD or 128GB SSD
• Matte screen

I think the secret to a great laptop is a matte screen - having almost no reflection on the screen is an absolute must for me. Do you guys have anything that you stick to and try to avoid?

 

It really depends on their needs and how much they want to pull out of it. They normally tell me what they want to do with it and I normally advise them to wait a little bit for the sales if they aren't in a rush. So I don't have a minimum spec sheet.

 

Clock speed of 1.5Ghz or 2Ghz is meaningless if you are not talking about the same family of processors. A skylake 6th gen i5 @2GHz will tear apart a core2duo even at 4Ghz.
500GB is too small, 1TB must be the minimum
4GB is good enough I guess.

 

I don't recall recommending laptop to anyone, but if I am buying for my son, then I like to get a large storage that I can afford, better processor and big enough ram to run it. I also looked for durability, and reliability too. Plus, the total price is also taken into consideration. I usually take a long time for researching and comparing prices before I can make my final decision then cross my fingers for a better result.

 

We pretty much have the same requirements. However, almost every laptop in retail stores today has as least 4GB of RAM and 500GB of storage. So, those were irrelevant. I could be wrong, but that's based on my experience. I seldom see laptops with less than 4GB of RAM or 500GB of storage.

So now, the first thing I say when someone ask me is, "The processor should be at least Intel Core i3 or i5 series and it should be the latest generation of said series. You should be safe with that. "

 

Well I am little thrown off because of the distinction between friends and family and everyone else. Are you suggesting that people other than friends and family are getting bogus recommendations? If that is the case, I hope the people at the stores are not feeding me some nonsense. Actually I bet they probably are, but you know what I mean. I think that when I recommend a computer for anyone I just try to emphasize the things that I like and stress that they work for ME, and so it MIGHT work for them.