The next step up is everydaylaptop computers, sometimes called notebooks, with screens from 13 inches to 15 inches. This is the sweet shop for laptops, where the most are sold and prices are keenest. Notebooks are light enough to carry occasionally and can usually manage half a day’s work away from power, but budget ones often lack style, speed and build quality.

The basics

Laptops come in three categories. At the small and portable end are ultra-lights, designed for stressed-out executives formatting Excel spreadsheets on the Heathrow Express. Not to be confused with budget netbooks (we have a wholebuying guidejust for them), ultra-lights tend to be nicely designed, a little sluggish and shockingly expensive. Their screen sizes range from around 11.5 inches to 13 inches.

“We will appropriately reflect a hike in HDD prices on laptops,” Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said Friday at an investor conference. “The range will be in the hundreds of Taiwan dollars, depending on different product categories.”

First things first

You’ll need two things when shopping for a laptop: a clear idea of what you want to do with it; and a firm budget. The good news is that all new laptops will be fine for checking email, surfing the Web wirelessly, working on office documents, and enjoying your photo and music collections. Where things start to get trickier is if you’re heavily into gaming, want to watch (or edit) HD video or need a computer that works well away from power sockets or in extreme conditions.

Another researcher, IDC, has estimated that the flooding in Thailand will affect about one-third of the country’s annual production of 120 million hard disk drives.