The Best Laptops For Bloggers
This is a guest article written by Emma Best from Laptopical is a great resource for those wanting to read unbiased user-friendly reviews. They also have a Twitter account, which you can follow here. This post is about the types of laptops suitable for bloggers.
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Laptops today can handle almost any task. Whether you’re interested in portability, performance or screen size, there is a laptop out there for you. If you’re a blogger, then the most important feature of any laptop you own has to be the keyboard. If you’re the kind of blogger who likes to blog from outside the home, portability will run a strong second. You don’t need a gigantic resolution or a monstrous graphics card to type, but a comfortable keyboard and the flexibility to blog on the go will be essential for most blog artists. If you’re looking for a laptop to blog in, consider the following types of laptops:
Netbooks
Netbooks are inexpensive and extremely portable, and more and more of them are becoming 3G capable even in the US, which means you won’t even be tied down to WiFi hotspots if you use one. There are a number of good choices, but take a look at the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, the Acer Aspire One, the MSI Wind or the Asus Eee PC if you’re in the market. The downside to these machines is that while the 10” variety comes close, they all sport less than full sized keyboards. Unless you’re just popping out one-liners on Twitter, you are going to find an external keyboard a must, reducing the portability. This is the height of being mobile at the cost of your keyboard, and only recommendeded if blogging on the move is essential.
Desktop Replacements
Desktop replacements are just like they sound, packed with enough goodies to replace your desktop while still being just portable enough to be considered a laptop. Desktop replacements are excellent choices for most bloggers because they all feature full sized and occasionally luxurious keyboards. One of our favorite desktop replacements is the enormous Lenovo W700. We would also recommend the HP Pavilion HDX18 (aff), the Asus M70SA, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y710, and the 17” MacBook Pro. The downside to these machines is that they tend to be heavy, bulky, and worst of all, expensive. But, regardless, they remain extremely comfortable to type on and are still easy enough to move from room to room, even if you won’t often want to leave the house with them. Many of these laptops will come with high end graphics options – we recommend stripping them down to save money, since for blogging purposes the size and stability of the keyboard are the main selling points of these machines.
Thin and Light
The perfect compromise between the above two categories, thin and light notebooks are potentially the perfect blend for a blogger. As you may have guessed, they are thin and light enough to be very portable, but more importantly they accomplish this while remaining large enough to sport potentially comfortable keyboards. Be sure to check out the Lenovo ThinkPad X300/X301 series, as well as the 13”/15” MacBooks and the Dell XPS M1330 or Vostro 1310. These laptops tend to strike a balance between mobility and performance, but often they do a good job of giving you both, which is nice but unfortunately very expensive. In the end though, they do a good job of providing keyboards that are comfortable to type on without burdening you with an 8lbs+ weight, so you won’t hate the idea of taking it down to the Starbucks. Just know that you might be sacrificing your number pad and your nice wrist rest to achieve this.
In the end, the type of laptop you’ll blog best on will depend on the way you go about your blogging. For most people we imagine desktop replacements would be the best choice, since they are far and away the best computers to work on if mobility is a non-issue. Depending on how mobile you need to be, however, considering thin and light notebooks or even netbooks makes a lot of sense too. The most important thing is to know what your own needs are, and make sure you shop around for the type of laptop that will suit them best.
So, what laptop do you use?
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I have an Acer TravelMate 6291, and I dual-boot Ubuntu and Vista Ultimate on it. It’s pretty good, although its 512 megabytes of RAM didn’t cut it for me (I added 1 gigabyte of memory). Runs stuff pretty well.
Great post. I think bloggers and non-bloggers alike would find this post very useful.
@Dean – Hey Dean, thanks for dropping by. I have an HP530, with ubuntu and XP on dual boot… pretty good, and 512 wasn’t enough, so I too added another 1GB. Runs like the wind
Good subject.
I’m planning to take off for six months next year and blog from the road as I travel the country. I bought a Macbook Pro this summer, and it’s my first Mac, and so far I’m finding it a great laptop. Even as a longtime Windows user, I’m finding it user friendly and easy to use. It has plenty of power, and it’s lightweight, so great for travel.
Great article, defo thumbs up
Hey Neil!
thanks for dropping by
another laptop article coming up
Great post. I use IBM Lenovo N100
Thanks for you post.
I have an acer 5630 with vista.
After some major upgrades, it gets the job done.
Thanks for the great post i use a desktop right now but i am looking into getting a laptop
thanks
I recently purchased a Dell Mini 10 from Sam’s for $348. The battery is only a three cell, but a six cell is soon to be available. The size of te keyboard is 92% compared to the regular sized Dell keyboard. I am using it right now…sitting on the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table even though I have a full sized Dell laptop in the bedroom. It is light and I can literally fit it and its accesories in my (big) purse. It is also blue which was no additional charge when purchased from Sam’s. Also red, green and pink available. At Dell a different color top is forty bucks.
Cindi….
[..] A little unrelated, but I rather liked this blog post [..]
I am looking for this information, Thanks for that article, very helpful to me.
excellent article ! Compaq Presario CQ62-200 is my favorite laptop with 2 GB ram and im comfortable and enjoying with and i want to a next laptop of big screen size so for right decision i’ll waiting for next articles thanks for the article, and would be very helpful to me.