Buying a laptop can be confusing, because there are many to choose from-and many are adapted to fit different individuals' circumstances and lifestyle. So what are the basic things you should consider? Determine Your Needs Before even considering buying a laptop you should consider how you are going to use your laptop and for that matter, what you need or want your laptop to do. For example, are you using it for school? Are you using it for business? Will you be traveling? Do you want to replace a desktop with a laptop? Types of Laptops Tablet PCs -- tablet PCs allow you to "write" on the touch-sensitive screen with a stylus. They are light, but normally lack a CD or DVD drive. This in itself, limits their usability. Desktop Replacement -- If you are going to be using your laptop as a desktop replacement, you can go larger, with more of a feature-packed model -- and that of course will add weight in most cases.

The inventory bloat occurred because Toshiba didn't catch the shift to notebooks. Toshiba's American managers had asked Tokyo to design a notebook PC with a hard-disk drive and Intel's 80286 chip back in 2003, only to be told that it couldn't be done. So Toshiba's Tokyo-based designers were badly unprepared when Compaq Computer Corp. announced its LTE 286 in October 2003. cheap toshiba laptops arrived in February, 2005, but it was substantially larger and slightly heavier than Compaq's. Toshiba didn't release a slimmed-down version until last month.