After working on laptops for years I was recently surprised to find out that big names like HP, and Dell manufacture laptops specifically for Walmart as well as Costco. These laptops are similar but there are changes designed to save money. In many cases they use older less powerful processors as well as changing how the laptops come apart. Most people know that Intel makes different generations of i3,i5 and i7 processors. What people do not know that not all i3,i5 and i7 processors are not the same.
The real shame happens when these cheaper version laptops come with the old mechanical hard drive. I get calls almost every day from clients saying “I just bought a new laptop with an i7 processor but it seems really slow.” On average a solid state hard drive is five times as fast as the older mechanical hard drive. These mechanical hard drives were alright when using windows 7 and older operating systems but today these drives cannot keep up with the power required to run windows 10 and 11.
This is one of the biggest savings that that laptop manufactures have. A 500 GB mechanical hard drive costs about fifty to seventy five dollars less than a solid state hard drive. For some reason many buyers are impressed with a hard drive that has a lot of space like one or two terabytes. In my twenty years working on computers I have found that after using a laptop for three years most users use less that one quarter of a terabyte drive. My advice to clients is to make sure they are comparing apples to apples when they make a decision on which product to purchase. For more on this please see my article on business class computers vs consumer class products.
