 What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we are talking about laptops. Now there are a lot of things that make a good laptop but I'm going to be trying to focus on the most relevant and most important things that you should be looking out for when you are searching for a new laptop. The first thing that we're going to be talking about are the actual specs of a laptop then we'll go on to my computer and we'll take a look at a few laptops that meet all those specifications and then at the very end we will look at a laptop that I just bought again that meets all those specifications and I'll kind of explain why I bought this laptop. Now before we jump into the specifications I want to say that everything we're about to talk about also pertains to PCs. PCs are stationary where laptops you can take just about anywhere and so I feel like most people especially myself I prefer laptops instead of PCs but everything we're about to talk about can apply so if you want to build a PC or buy a PC the specifications will be just about the same. So let's talk about the specifications that I think are the most important when you're buying any laptop the first one is storage. The laptop that I had for the past two years the one that I share with my wife and the one that you probably have seen on screen that one had 512 gigabytes of storage and it just was not enough for me. I had a lot of software in there from my data analytics stuff like Tableau and Python and Siebel server to my video editing stuff and I also had a lot of files on there and even though I exported all of my files onto external hard drives I just couldn't keep up. The 512 gigabytes of storage for me personally was not enough storage and so I want you to really think about how much storage you're going to need in this next laptop. Are you going to be using a lot of software? Are you going to need a lot of file storage space? Are you going to use external hard drives? These things are things to think about. Now there are different kinds of storage. There is SSD and there's HDD. HDD is kind of the old version the legacy system with a rotating disk in it. Compared to the SSD it is extremely slow. It's about one-tenth of the read-write speed. So in my opinion you should almost always go for SSD. It's going to be much faster. It will almost have no chance of breaking down whereas the HDD with the rotating disk has a much larger chance of breaking especially if you drop your laptop. Whereas the SSD it really doesn't have as big of a chance or any chance at all really of breaking. It's a solid state drive. It has no internal moving parts. So that is a huge upside to using an SSD versus an HDD. Now how much storage do you actually need? I think at a bare minimum you need 256 gigabytes of storage. I think for most people that's going to be enough although it causes me a lot of anxiety thinking about that little of storage but if you're not going to be downloading a ton of software and you're not going to use a ton of files or you're going to have lots of external hard drives that should be enough. I personally recommend getting at least 512. 256 will work. It is more expensive to have more storage and that's why if you can't afford a very expensive laptop you may have to cut on the storage. I personally recommend 512 gigabytes. I think that will suit almost anybody's needs or at least the average person's needs in terms of storage. If you can swing it a terabyte or more would be absolutely fantastic but I think for most people you don't need that much. It just gives you a lot of breathing room to download basically as much software and files as you need. The next thing that we're going to look at is RAM and that stands for Random Access Memory and I'm going to read really quick what I have in my notes that says it puts data you're actively using in temporary storage for faster access and speed. So when you're using software like SQL or Python or R that's going to use a lot of temporary storage aka RAM and so you want to make sure you have enough RAM to make sure those processes run efficiently otherwise they're going to run very very slowly. So how much RAM do you need? At a bare minimum I recommend 8 gigabytes of RAM but to be fair almost all laptops have that. Some do have four which is the next step below that but that's pretty rare you'll most likely find eight. For the type of work that we do I definitely would recommend 16. You don't have to go much above that there's 32 and 64 but honestly unless you're doing intense machine learning you really don't need above 16 gigabytes of RAM. The next thing to look at is the processor. Now the processor is basically the brains of the computer it's what's doing all the back-end calculations and doing really all the work and so the processor is pretty important. There are two main types of processors that you're going to see in almost every laptop that's either AMD or Intel. Now there's a lot of debate on which is better but to be honest they're pretty comparable so I really wouldn't take a side either one should be perfectly fine for what you're trying to do. If you go Intel try to get an i5 or better they're already on i9 most laptops have i7 and then i5 is still really good but it's just obviously not as advanced as their most recent versions. I personally would recommend getting an i7 you can find those in a lot of laptops these days and they're becoming much more common although they are still a little bit expensive you can find it in a lot of laptops. If you were going AMD at the minimum I would recommend a Ryzen 5 but I personally recommend getting a Ryzen 7 for the exact same reasons as getting the Intel i5 versus the Intel i7 it's just newer it's better it's becoming much more common in a lot of mid-tier or mid-price laptops. The last thing that we're going to talk about is screen size. Now screen size is super important to me although I know there are people watching this who are like eight inch MacBook Pros and don't care about screen size at all but it matters to me. I personally think that a larger screen is really important for the type of work that we do unless you have like a dual monitor or you're able to have some type of setup like that but if you're only using your laptop I think a big screen is really essential. I personally recommend a 15.6 inch screen or above I have found that to be pretty much the optimal size but you can go up I think there's like 17 and a 19 inch if you want to just go massive but a 15.6 inch screen should be plenty of room to do what you need to do on your screen. Now that we talked about all the specifications let's go into my screen and take a look at some laptops that meet a lot of those criteria. So let's take a look at our first laptop this is an HP Elite Book. The only thing that I think that it doesn't meet in our specifications is that it has a 14 inch display but it has the i5 Intel processor it also has 256 gigabytes of SSD so that's really nice it also has these 16 gigabytes of RAM and it comes in at $400 so it's a very affordable laptop and I think it hits a lot of the specifications that we're hoping for so if you're looking for a more affordable laptop this looks like a pretty good option. Let's look at our second laptop this is the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 series 3593 laptop I don't know what any of that means but it does have a 15.6 inch screen it comes in with the Intel i5 processor 16 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of SSD storage so it hits everything on our list and it does come in with a little bit heavier of price so the other one was 400 about this one comes in at $639 but again it hits everything that we're looking for and so this is a really good price for what seems to be a really nice laptop the third laptop that we're going to take a look at is the Acer Aspire 5 has a 15.6 inch screen this one has the AMD processor and it's the Ryzen 5 it has 16 gigabytes of RAM and this one has one terabyte of storage so it goes above and beyond in terms of storage which I personally find super important this one obviously comes in a little bit more expensive at $759 if you look right here though there are lots of different options and configurations that you can do in terms of storage and RAM if you want more storage you can get a terabyte of SSD plus a terabyte of HDD for like $50 more but that's because they're adding on a terabyte of HDD which is the legacy system which is a lot cheaper to add and so I personally would most likely just go with the one terabyte of SSD but again this one hits everything that we're looking for and more and so this looks like a really nice laptop the fourth laptop that we're going to look at is the Lenovo Legion 5 now this is a gaming laptop and honestly I found that gaming laptops have a lot of the specs that I'm looking for and so the next one is also a gaming laptop so if that's not your thing you know you don't have to get a gaming laptop I just found that these ones were really good but it has a 15.6 inch screen it does come with an AMD processor and the Ryzen 7 which is the upgraded one from the Ryzen 5 which was in the last laptop has 16 gigabytes of ram 512 gigabytes of SSD and this does come with a Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti and that's a graphics card and so if you care about graphics or anything like that this has it and so that's a really nice perk this comes in at you know a little bit more than the other one I went from 400 to around 630 to 750 now up to right around a thousand dollars of course you're getting a lot of perks and upgrades with this something that you'll get in a gaming laptop that you will not get in regular laptops like the one we were looking at is these usually have cooling systems they have fans inside of them that blow all the hot air out and so they cool themselves a lot better and so if you have issues like I have had in the past where you have a really really hot laptop sitting on your lap and it just it's unbearable these usually do pretty well with getting all that hot air out and keeping the system cool so that you can keep it on your lap and you don't you don't burn yourself so that is the Lenovo Legion 5 let's look at our final laptop the fifth and final laptop is the HP Omen this comes in with a 15.6 inch screen it does have the AMD processor and that is the Ryzen 7 has the 16 gigabytes of RAM 1 terabyte of SSD and also comes in with the exact same graphics card as the Lenovo Legion 5 so similar specs you know we didn't look at like kind of the design of it I don't know why I did that that was annoying but we didn't look at the design of all these laptops but there's different designs and different features within each one this is the most expensive one this comes in right around 1300 after taxes it's obviously more than that but this is the most expensive one coincidentally this is the one that I bought and I'm going to show you in just a second so let's get off the screen I'm going to show you this laptop and kind of explain why I bought it some of the things that I like and some of the things that I do not like about it so this is the HP Omen and if you are expecting any type of professional review of this you are in the wrong place just look up HP Omen reviews I'm really just going to walk through why I bought it and I'm going to have some really second rate b-roll and showing you some of the things that I'm talking about the biggest thing that I really like about this is it is extremely fast the processor is super good the RAM is 16 gigabytes so it has plenty of speed and it has a terabyte of storage which I've already used quite a bit of it those are the things internally that I like a lot now something that I did not talk about at all in terms of what you should be looking for in laptop something that I find extremely important and you would only know if you made it to this point in the video is that I really like a lot of ports now there are a lot of ports on here there are like seven or eight ports on this laptop and three of them are USB which I use a lot and on my last laptop I only had one and so I had to use this like adapter that split into multiple USB ports and I'm really glad I don't have to use that anymore this has really made it easy for me to just plug everything in I don't have to use adapters or any extra cables or anything like that something that I really really like another thing that I like that I kind of touched on earlier is that this is a gaming laptop so it has fans underneath it so when it starts getting hot it starts cooling itself off by turning on these fans now there is a downside to this as well because they get extremely loud now listen to this real quick and see how loud this actually gets yeah so it gets pretty loud but it only gets like that if you're like really working the system if you're watching like Netflix or something like that it's never going to do that so you know it's kind of give and take it really doesn't happen that often but when it does it is really going one other thing I had to take into consideration was actually the looks of the laptop this laptop you're going to see on screen a lot in future videos and so I wanted to kind of find one that looked really cool that looked nice on camera the other one which was the Lenovo Legion 5 I really considered but I didn't like how the back of it looked which is you know really superficial but you know I have a YouTube channel and so I want it to look nice but in terms of specs they both were very similar and so if you were thinking about you know saving like 300 I'd go with the Lenovo Legion 5 if you're not making YouTube videos like me that one will do absolutely fantastic has a really good processor and so you know I think that aesthetically this one just turned out to be better for me and so you know that's one thing that I liked about this one more than I liked about just about every other laptop that I looked at the only other thing that I do not like about this laptop is how heavy it is I like how bulky it is I like kind of its thickness I just really do not like that it weighs like 20 pounds now it weighs like maybe like seven pounds but compared to my last laptop which was like three pounds it was very thin very light this one is a behemoth and so if you like smaller laptops gaming laptops really aren't for you they're bigger because they have a lot more inside of them as well as a cooling system so take that into consideration this one is pretty bulky so overall the pros definitely outweigh the cons this one has just about everything I'm looking for in terms of specs the downside for me is the really loud fan which has turned on a few times and it's been quite noisy as well as the heaviness of it you know again I like the bulkiness I like how big it is but I just don't like you know how how much it actually weighs when I have to put it in my backpack or carry it around or you know take it places it's just really heavy and inconvenient whereas my last laptop was really light so really small things in my eyes for me for what I do this laptop is just about perfect I don't plan on getting rid of it anytime soon I want this one to be like the one I use for the next three or four years on this channel and so hopefully it will last me through kind of everything that I put it through all the tutorials and future videos but yeah that is the HP Omen and that is why I got this laptop I hope that this video has been helpful and helps you find a laptop that is right for you I know typically we talk about software on this channel so it's a nice change of pace at least for me to talk about some hardware because you know both are really important you can't really have really good running software if you don't have the good hardware so I hope that you are just as interested in this stuff as I am with that being said thank you guys so much I really appreciate it if you want to support this channel be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you in the next video