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Laptop Parts --What's Better, What's Best

There are many laptop parts in a small space in a laptop computer. As you can see from the picture, the inside of a laptop case is a confusing jumble. Most of the parts are very difficult to change or replace if you're not a trained professional.

If you get parts upgraded or replaced by a professional, you are generally paying list price for the part, and a hefty labor charge. It is important to get the right laptop parts as your components when you buy your laptop.

When you look at an advertisement for, or a description of a laptop computer, you see a lot of numbers. There is a screen size in inches in the US, a processor number like AMD RM-70 or intel T3200, a hard drive size like 160 GB, an amount of memory like 3GB DDR2, and possibly a speed for the optical drive. All these things tell you something about the computer, but they are intentionally vague.

I gave a general overview of what is in a laptop and some general information about the various laptop parts on my hardware page and the pages linked to it. Here I will give some more technical and detailed information.

Laptop displays come in two basic flavors, wide screen and standard. Within these general groups, There are multple different resolutions within each group. Some do not meet the standards of true high definition. The lower resolutions are now usually only found on hand-held devices such as phones a Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Click on the picture for more details.

Laptop hard drives come in three basic types, PATA (also known as IDE or ATA), SATA, and solid state. SATA and IDE drives are the traditional spinning platters. Solid state drives have no movng patrs and should have a speed advantage. Click on the picture for more details.

Laptop memory is relatively straight forward, but there are more details to be learned. If you are interested click on the picture for more details.

A laptop video card is one of the most complicated choices you may have to make. Usually though, you will only have options in my entry level or higher groups. The picture will bring you to some information about dedicated video cards. These links will bring you to either general notebook video card information or information about a video accelerator.

Wireless internet access was discussed earlier. You can click on the picture for more details.

Laptop processors seem to be named to maximize confusion. I'll describe Intel's naming and try to break the processors into groups that match the groups I've put the notebook computers into. Click on the picture for more details.

Even finding out what particular motherboard is in a notebook computer is difficult at times. I'm not going to give additional details about motherboards because you really don't have a choice. The picture is sort of pretty though.

Deciding what laptop parts you want in your computer is one of the first steps you should take when buying a laptop computer.

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