If you are a business owner or require a laptop for business use, your needs will exceed those of the average laptop user. The average laptop user may use a laptop for surfing the net, sending a few e-mails, online shopping, watching videos or listening to music. A business user on the other hand, may use a laptop for storing files, creating documents, cloud computing, conducting online marketing, web conferencing or accessing their website CMS. Therefore, there will be many different features that a business user should look for in a laptop.

Here are our top 5 tips for choosing a business laptop.

Physical Size Should Be an Important Consideration

If your business requires you to travel regularly, accompanied by your laptop, you may consider a more travel friendly 11 or 12 inch screen size. Netbooks and ultra-books have smaller screens and are much lighter in weight, and they are therefore the most suitable choice for travel. However, if you will be using your laptop for web conferencing or graphic design and if it will mainly sit on a table all day, you may want to consider a 17 inch screen to suit your requirements better.

Hard-Drive Size Be 500GB or Bigger

If you aren’t downloading films and music, you may not see the need for a 500 GB hard drive. However, a business user will usually require business specific software to be downloaded onto their laptop, such as the Adobe Creative Suite, Skype or Sage. Given the value of the laptop and the information stored on it, you will need significant, powerful anti-virus and laptop tracking software to ensure its protection. Many business people still choose to store files on their computer systems either instead or as well as storing information on the cloud. Hence, hard drive space can be quickly used up.

Make Security a Priority 

Given the value of the laptop to your business, you will need to ensure its security. Try to purchase a laptop which comes with at least a free trial of a powerful anti-virus software program. A business laptop should also have a good warranty and you should investigate insurance protection too in the case of theft or damage of your own accord.

Connectivity

A business user will often require their laptop to perform presentations. Therefore your laptop should be Wi-Fi enabled and contain ports for appropriate external adaptors. It should also include data ports so that you can easily back-up your files to a back-up data system if necessary. Your laptop should be able to support several internet sources, be it Wi-Fi, Ethernet, home or mobile broadband.

Choose a Top Notch Processor

Whichever element of a business laptop you try to make savings on, don’t scrimp on the processor. Business laptops require at least a dual-processor such as the Intel Core i3 processor, if not a quad-processor to ensure that it offers a powerful, speedy performance, as a business user would require.

Hopefully these top tips will help you to make a more informed decision when purchasing a business laptop. A business laptop is an investment, choose wisely!

Author Bio:

Carlo Cretaro is a freelance blogger and social media consultant for a range of Irish and UK businesses including Eurieka.ie.