Where are the user-ranked laptop reviews?
Newegg.com is great for customer reviews. NotebookReview.com‘s homepage ranks the most popular laptops on its site by click count, for what its worth. Also, the reviews seem more aware of the market, though I only care for their gratuitous close-ups.
I think laptop reviews are only useful in terms of gauging a product’s reliability or some glaring shortcoming. Everything else is just anecdotal noise. What should guide your purchasing process is a short list of needs and wants followed by your budget. I needed a very light weight laptop, so that limited to me to 12.1″ ultra portables. I didn’t want to spend more than $400 so that limited me to buying used. I’m a windows person so that excluded any Apple products… I found the laptop I wanted on eBay from a reputable seller. I generally DO NOT suggest buying used laptops unless you have an IT background and are comfortable diagnosing and fixing potentially serious problems. The point is, I designed a game plan around my needs and went from there. Reviews only helped initially identify the makes and models I was interested in…
but the user reviews are more likely to touch on reliability than the editorial reviews Which is why I wrote specifically, “laptop reviews are only useful in terms of gauging a product’s reliability or some glaring shortcoming…” I wasn’t delineating between user reviews and critical reviews. Neither are useful unless yo have some rough outline for what you’re needs are…
