LAPTOP DEALS OF THE WEEK

Deals are selected by the CNET Group commerce team, and may be unrelated to this article.

GeekBook X14 Pro: Geekom’s first laptop is impressively thin and light but battery life disappoints. And I detest the touch pad.

Lenovo IdeaPad 5i 16 2-in-1 Gen 10: Lenovo's low-cost, 16-inch two-in-one is a versatile machine, but it forces you to live with more than a couple of compromises in the design.

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16 Aura Edition: Centered around a gorgeous 16-inch OLED display, this kick-ass Yoga laptop provides the performance and build that graphics pros demand.

Microsoft Surface Pro (12-inch): The 12-inch version of Microsoft's detachable two-in-one will suffice for most users, but getting nickel-and-dimed by optional accessories that feel quite necessary is annoying.

Dell 14 Premium: Dell’s creator laptop is rock solid to a fault.

HP OmniBook 5 14: Record-setting battery life is only part of its charm. It also has a pleasing design, OLED display and ample RAM and storage -- all at an affordable price.

Acer Aspire 16 AI: Weighing less than 3.5 pounds and offering amazing battery life, this is the rare 16-inch laptop that's easy to take with you.

Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition: This premium two-in-one is a near-perfect package with a fantastic OLED display and record-setting battery life.

Lenovo LOQ 15: This budget gaming laptop has an outdated design but serves up modern components and good 3D performance for the price.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1: This business convertible boasts great build quality and battery life but the display disappoints.

HP Omen 16: This Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 rig offers good looks and competitive 1080p performance along with surprisingly long battery life and a cool twist on four-zone RGB keyboard backlighting

Alienware Aurora 16: I tested two Alienware Aurora gaming laptops, and this is not the one to get.

Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10: I was impressed with this midrange gaming laptop's 3D performance, but its vibrant, surprisingly bright OLED display puts it over the top.

Acer Nitro V 16S AI: This budget gaming laptop serves up a big screen and big value.

MSI Katana 15 HX: I liked its 1080p performance but little else.

HP OmniBook X Flip 16: While it has a handful of appealing features, this midrange 16-inch convertible ends up being a clumsy assemblage of disparate parts.

Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition: It offers a cheap path to an OLED ultraportable, but is a ThinkPad a ThinkPad without the little red nub in the middle of the keyboard?

HP OmniBook X Flip 14: This two-in-one laptop offers style, value and configuration options abound, including a 3K OLED display for only an extra $100.

Microsoft Surface Laptop (13-inch): It’s compact, solidly built and great for travel, but the 13.8-inch version is the better choice as your daily driver.

Acer Swift Go 16 (2025): Built around a beautiful 16-inch OLED screen, the latest Swift Go 16 improves on its predecessors without a significant price increase.

Dell 16 Plus 2-in-1: This big-screen, mini-LED convertible laptop certainly has some positives, but there are a few too many negatives to give this Plus a full-throated recommendation.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition: It’s a great business laptop, but it can get pricey fast with upgrades.

Acer Swift 14 AI: This midrange Copilot Plus PC offers incredible battery life but is missing one key feature.

HP EliteBook X G1a: X does not mark the spot for this biz laptop when the Ultra version costs roughly the same and supplies a far better display inside a slimmer, more compact design.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i 14 Gen 10: It's ultrastylish and ultracompact, but maybe don't hide the camera behind the display next time.

The review process for laptops consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our reviewers. This includes evaluating a device's aesthetics, ergonomics and features with respect to price. A final review verdict is a combination of both objective and subjective judgments. 

We test all laptops with a core set of benchmarks, including Primate Labs Geekbench 6, Cinebench R23, PCMark 10, a variety of 3DMark benchmarks (whichever can run on the laptop), UL Procyon Photo and Video (where supported), and our own battery life test. If a laptop is intended for gaming, we'll also run benchmarks from Guardians of the Galaxy, The Rift Breaker (CPU and GPU) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

For the hands-on, the reviewer uses it for their work during the review period, evaluating how well the design, features (such as the screen, camera and speakers) and manufacturer-supplied software operate as a cohesive whole. We also place importance on how well they work, given their cost and where the manufacturer has potentially made upgrades or trade-offs for its price.

The list of benchmarking software and comparison criteria we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. You can find a more detailed description of our test methodology on our How We Test Computers page. 

Dell sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models are available in multiple configurations to match your performance and budget needs. If you need help finding the right Dell laptop, we can help. Here are the main considerations to keep in mind when shopping for a new laptop.

Price

The search for a new laptop for most people starts with price. If the statistics chipmaker Intel and PC manufacturers hurl at us are correct, you'll be holding onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a little to get better specs, do it. That stands whether you're spending $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront with an eye toward upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop makers are increasingly moving away from making components easily upgradable, so again, it's best to get as much laptop capability as you can afford from the start. 

Generally speaking, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer display, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design from higher-end materials or even a more comfortable keyboard. All of these things add to the cost of a laptop. I'd love to say $500 will get you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that's not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800, and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is upward of about $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop capability for less. Like other vendors, Dell is constantly running sales on laptops on its site.

Size

If you'll be taking your laptop with you to class or work or just down to your local coffee shop most mornings, then you'll want a smaller and lighter laptop -- something with a 13-inch or 14-inch screen. If you're buying a laptop for your home or work and don't plan on traveling with it with any great frequency, then it might serve you well to get a larger 15-inch, 16-inch or even a 17-inch display that gives you more room to work, play and multitask. 

Display

When deciding on a display, there are many considerations: How much you need to display (which is surprisingly more about resolution than screen size), what types of content you'll be looking at, and whether you'll be using it for gaming or creative endeavors. 

You really want to optimize pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch the screen can display. Although other factors contribute to sharpness, a higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI Calculator if you don't feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math you need to do there.) We recommend a dot pitch of at least 100 pixels per inch as a rule of thumb.

Because of the way Windows can scale the display, you're frequently better off with a higher resolution than you'd think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller -- to fit more content in the view -- on a low-resolution screen. This is why a 4K, 14-inch screen may sound like unnecessary overkill, but may not be if you need to, say, view a wide spreadsheet. 

Text and the edges of images can look fuzzy on a lower-resolution display. Look for a Full HD 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution at a minimum -- or a 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution on laptops with 16:10 aspect ratios that are taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and provide more vertical screen space for work without significantly increasing the footprint. A Quad HD resolution of 2,560x1,440 pixels (2,560x1,600 on a 16:10 display) will result in crisper text and images and will likely suffice on a 13- or 14-inch laptop display -- you don't necessarily need a 4K display.

Processor

The processor, aka the CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. Making things trickier, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, like power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know what type is used. You can head to Intel's or AMD's sites for explanations so you get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm versus x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we’ve tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The graphics processor, or GPU, handles all the work of driving the screen and generating what gets displayed, as well as speeding up a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated or discrete. As the names imply, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Because the iGPU splits space, memory and power with the CPU, it's constrained by the limits of those. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn't perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative software that won't run unless they detect a dGPU or sufficient VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing and other nonspecialized apps will run fine on an iGPU, though.

For more power-hungry graphics needs, like video editing, STEM and design applications as well as gaming, you'll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on the Xe-branded (or the older UHD Graphics branding) iGPU technology in its CPUs.

Memory

For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the absolute bare minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up fast. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. A lot of sub-$500 laptops have 4GB or 8GB, which, in conjunction with a slower disk, can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered onto the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it's soldered and can't be upgraded. 

Some PC makers will solder memory on and leave an empty internal slot for adding a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the laptop's full specs online to confirm. Check the web for user experiences, because the slot may still be hard to get to, it may require nonstandard or hard-to-get memory or other pitfalls, including voiding the warranty.

Storage

You'll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally speedy, and cheaper laptops typically have slower drives. If the laptop only has 8GB of RAM, it may end up swapping to that drive, and the system may slow down quickly while you're working. 

Get what you can afford, and if you need to go with a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two down the road, or use cloud storage to bolster a small internal drive. The one exception is gaming laptops: We don't recommend going with less than a 512GB SSD unless you really like uninstalling games every time you want to play a new game.