When buying a new laptop, there are a huge number of elements and components to keep in mind. Understanding what you need versus what you want can be a tricky situation, regardless of whether you’re buying new or second-hand. Understanding these complexities, we created this article to help those who rely on their laptops for low-demand uses like playing online casino and web games, as well as general browsing and word-processing duties.
What’s Needed for Online Casino Games?
We’ve taken casino games like online slots as an example because they illustrate a common level of involvement that many of us have with the interactive entertainment sphere. Games like Baam Boom and White King II represent the heights of what casino titles can achieve, yet they still have low requirements in terms of data and processing cost. Like web games and general browsing, this means users won’t have to break the bank with a new laptop, but there are still key components that need to be considered for the best experience.
Wants and Needs
As a baseline, practically any laptop running Windows 7 and above will be able to play online slots. That said, the wrong setup can make the experience less than ideal. So, what do you really need to get ahead?
The first practical must is a laptop with a solid-state drive rather than a traditional mechanical hard drive. Setting these two systems apart is how an SSD has no moving parts, while a mechanical drive has a more traditional rotary read/write system. For the end user, this difference manifests in vastly different loading speeds. On the slow end, SSDs can operate ten times faster than a mechanical drive, with newer drives capable of even more of a difference.
“Samsung SSD 850 pro and Dell Laptop” (CC BY 2.0) by Simply Home Tips
The necessity of such drives might seem confusing given the small size of online casino games, and that they load from the internet, but there’s a good reason an SSD is so important here. This is because, while casino games load online, everything else does not. From your operating system to your browser, SSDs will make an enormous difference and can generate performance increases that can make or break an experience.
Next up is the use of a mouse for input. Laptops come with touchpads, sure, but these are less than ideal for most software. Even in online casino games, which are extremely easy to control, touchpads are clunky, frustrating to use, and can start to act up with age. To this end, a simple mouse can vastly improve the experience.
Finally, users will also need to keep in mind advertisements for discrete GPUs. These are separate cards in a laptop that massively increase 3D performance versus graphics chips which are integrated into the CPU. GPUs can be great, but they’re expensive and almost always not necessary for peak online game performance, so they can safely be ignored.
“HP Laptop PC” (CC BY-ND 2.0) by TheBetterDay
With these few components in mind, you’ll be well on the way to ensuring your next laptop can handle all the simple tasks you throw at it. One final thing to remember is that aiming for eight gigabytes of RAM can also be a big help, though four will usually manage fine too. Take your time when buying, read reviews whenever possible, and your chances of an upgrade you’re happy with will be all the better for it.
