What sort of laptop should I get for wireless Internet use?

Someone in the UK asked me the following in October 2005: “i'm looking to buy my daughter a laptop for Christmas ……… apparantley theres such a thing as wireless internet connection ………… wondered if you could give me a couple of pointers on what i should be seeking on a laptop with this connection ……… she only wants to do her homework on it but i may want to jump on it sometimes to do some browsing …………” and I responded as follows:

Wireless Internet connections involve having a wireless network card in the laptop. This can either be a chip that's built into the motherboard when it's put together or you can buy a network card that pushes into the PCMCIA card slot or you can even get wireless network cards that simply plug into a USB port these days. If I put a USB wireless network card (brand new) onto a [D-A-L] auction, it would be under £50 inc delivery. So, with this in mind, you can see that it's not worth paying massively more just to get a wireless-enabled laptop because any decent laptop can be upgraded with a PCMCIA or USB wireless network card.

For your reference, wireless home networks are referred to as a Wireless Local Area Network and this is normally abbreviated to WLAN.

'Centrino' is a label that many Intel laptops now have. Centrino functionality means that it's been designed with WLAN capabilities fully integrated.

The concepts of how you set up wireless networking are very similar to normal networking except that the communication between devices is over the air instead of down a cable.

There are two speeds of wireless network card (802.11b and 802.11g) and a third one just around the corner 802.11n). For the moment, at least, any of those speeds will be able to handle your broadband without any loss of performance. Having said that, you might outgrow an 802.11b in the next couple of years so 802.11g would be preferable as that will satisfy almost anyone. The forthcoming 802.11n standard will be the ultimate for business users but over the top for home networks unless you are getting into some serious multi-player gaming across several laptops and PCs on the network (so don't pay more for it).

The reason that the wireless bit is a network card and not a modem is because you have to form a network between the laptop and a wireless router. The wireless router plugs into your phone line to get your broadband signal, thus replacing your broadband modem that you already have (assuming that you're on broadband).

I couldn't tell from your message whether you're looking for a new or used laptop. I thoroughly recommend Dell for both new and used laptops. They always have some kind of special offer going on on their web site: http://www.dell.co.uk. For used laptops, I would also recommend considering IBM Thinkpads. I have never bought one myself but they have a good reputation for reliability and lasting a long time.

With regards to the spec that you should be looking for, I actually bought Dell's cheapest laptop that they had (in fact, it was an end-of-line product - just happened to be buying at the right time and got it for £349!). Bearing in mind that I'm an IT Manager and I'm on it ALL the time, it must be pretty good for general use.

The downsides of it are that it only has a standard 14" display, i.e. 1024x768 resolution. My work laptop has the more expensive SXGA 14" display (1400x1050 resolution), which means you can fit much much more on the screen. This, in layman's terms, means you can fit bigger Excel spreadsheets onto the screen and see the whole lot at once and you have to scroll around less in Internet Explorer when browsing around web sites. But the SXGA displays are a couple of hundred pounds more.

Also, it only came with 256Mb RAM. This is adequate for Windows XP but it can't keep up with all of the dozens of application windows that I have running at the same time .... so I promptly upgraded it to 512Mb. This only cost me £25 but it does mean that you have to open up the laptop and, if I later had a warranty problem and Dell deemed it to be caused by me fitting the memory myself, then I wouldn't be covered. So, if you're not comfortable with that, it's worth paying a bit more to get a laptop with 512Mb RAM.

If you're going to be copying lots of music (or especially videos) onto the hard disk, then you might find the 30Gb hard disk that I've got doesn't last you very long.

Even my budget laptop came with a DVD/CDRW combo drive. This means I can play DVDs on it and I can play and record CDs on it. This is the best value option for optical drives for most people at the moment. However, DVD-ReWriter (DVDRW) drives are getting more and more affordable all the time and worth considering if you think you might want to record your own DVDs.

My budget Dell comes with an Intel Celeron Mobile 1.3GHz processor. It's no top-of-the-line gaming monster but it's just about quick enough to keep up with anything that I want to do (and I do most things on it pretty quickly!). A 1.1GHz to 1.3GHz Celeron Mobile processor would be fine for your daughter to do her homework and for you to use the Internet/email. A Pentium M [which is available in 1.6GHz and higher versions] would be faster (and better designed for gaming) but a bit more expensive.

Finally, if you think it might be used for games or video editing, consider paying extra for a dedicated graphics card such as one of the ATi graphics chips that Dell use. These perform better for graphics-intensive stuff than the standard 'shared graphics memory' chips do. Again, you'll obviously pay extra for it but it's worth considering if it's a feature that you think you might get good use out of.

Computer Buyer magazine reviewed/tested a couple of wireless routers in their July [2005] issue, both of which were particularly good:

They gave the Edimax AR-7024WG wireless router a "Recommended" award with 5 stars out of a potential 6. At just £66 including VAT, they said that it wasn't easy to set up but it performed very well, particularly over long distances.

Even better than that, however, was the Hercules wireless router at £80 including VAT. Not only is this one very fast but it's apparently very easy to set up, with an intuitive setup wizard aimed at novice users. They rated this one as the "Best Buy" and awarded it 6 stars out of 6.