Laptop Buying Guide (Pakistan Focused)

Everyone is going laptop these days. Hence, one must be familiar with few things before buying a laptop so that you get a quality product against your well earned money.

Check Points: You may need to consider following things while purchasing a new laptop.

Price:

Go to laptop manufacturer’s  website, find out its price and convert foreign currency into local currency and then match the price with local computer market.

Usually the price on manufacturer’s website should match the local market, with slight margin of difference due to currency rate fluctuation.

Is it refurbished?

Refurbished laptops means Manufacture Company (such as DELL) repaired a laptop. By repair we mean, any part of laptop is repaired and is ready for sale with all accessories and packaging but at a low price.

There are slight chances that you might be getting a refurbished laptop, while you buy it as a NEW LAPTOP with 1 year warranty at low price.

For checking if laptop is refurbished or not, you must get laptop’s serial number and find out the remaining warranty of this particular laptop from its website. If remaining warranty is less than one year then you are surely buying a refurbished laptop.

Watch out, sometimes retailers remove serial sticker from the back of refurbished laptops.

Most of the time refurbished laptops are being offered with 3 to 6 months warranty.

Warranty: Is it locally claimed or internationally? With local warranty, it is easy for you to claim warranty – while if you are planning to travel across the globe then International warranty should be your choice.

Warranty Period: In How many years, months or days you can claim warranty for the laptop? , here don’t forget the warranty period time of refurbished laptop.

Accessories: what accessories should come with the box? For that you can check the manufacturer website to know the accessories sent during shipment by giving serial number of the laptop.

Usually retailers take our accessories and sell them with separate price to customers, such as ear phones etc.

Dead Pixel check: request retailer/seller to install any free dead pixel program, easily available online or download while checking the laptop at the shop (as most of the computer shops have WiFi).

By dead pixel we mean dead display areas in LCD of the laptop. You can also manually check this by changing background color of the desktop screen into white, green, red, blue and black. By changing these colors you can easily find out any dot or spot on the screen.

Keyboard keys check:

Write down the old one “the quick brown fox” statement to check working sense of keyboard alphabets and write in caps and small both forms.

Later on you can also check numeric pad as well with function keys.

HDMI Port Check:

Sometime, HDMI port is installed in laptop, but driver refuse detecting that HDMI port’s physical installation. For checking this out reinstall the drivers or check in device manager of the laptop to verify the functionality of the HDMI port.

Bluetooth Check:

In our local markets, most of laptops come with built-in Bluetooth devices, check and confirm from manufacturer and retailer about the Bluetooth device availability in the laptop.

It merits mentioning here that Bluetooth devices are usually taken out of laptop by resellers, so that they can sell it as a standalone product.

Factory Dos installed Laptops:

These laptops don’t come with windows operating system by default. So, if you get these laptops installed with windows operating system, this must be some pirated copy of windows installation.

These dos installed laptops are less expensive than factory installed windows Operating Systems.

Memory (RAM module) installations:

Sometime, retailers replace 1GB ram with 2 pairs of 512 mb ram that reduces the cost of laptop, but also reduce the speed and reselling of the laptop. As buying ram in 2 modules or less expensive than in a single module, so check the modules installation  and prefer single modules installation like 1GB or 2GB or 2GB+1GB=3GB etc

Happy Buying…!