The price you pay for the slimness is the lack of ports, with just two USB-C included and no HDMI to share your screen with a television.

Theres an intimidating number of products out there on the market, and they do a dizzying amount of things.

How do you find the best laptop for your needs in this haystack of microchips.

For a good all-rounder to use for work applications like spreadsheets and presentations, I would recommend devices above 400.

I wanted to find the best laptop for the casual user people who want a go-to machine that does the basics well and is designed for frequent use, without necessarily offering the whizz-bang computing power required by gamers or film editors or software designers.

Once upon a time, anyone looking for a new computer would spend ages comparing processing speeds and RAM.

However, laptops these days have really good processors (most use Intel, some use new kid-on-the-block AMD).

Ive included a detailed explanation on the merits of different processors at the bottom of this article but honestly, if youre looking for an everyday laptop, whatever you choose will be up to the job.

The only time I struggled during testing was when I had loads of tabs open on an Intel Core i3 (the entry level model).

All are very good operating systems which have slightly different ways of doing things.

Theyre all intuitive and theyve been user tested to within an inch of their lives, so whichever you choose, youll pick it up very quickly and itll soon feel natural.

Windows is perhaps a bit more technical, MacOS is a bit more user-friendly, ChromeOS has a bit less support for software developers, but its really not going to make a lot of difference to the layperson.

Most manufacturers would prefer you to use either an external hard-drive or cloud storage.

Ive explained a bit more about this down in the FAQs at the bottom of this article, but dont be too surprised if you see a laptop with less storage than youd expect.

You wont find programmes like Word or Excel here; theyve been replaced by Googles own suite of applications, including Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Gmail, which habitually save files to the cloud rather than your hard drive.

The quietly revolutionary idea is that you can pick up your work wherever you are, whatever device youre using.

No more facepalming when you realise youve left that work presentation on your laptop at home.

The Pixelbook is Googles first attempt to go it alone, allowing the creators of the OS to show exactly how their system should be handled.

Its blessedly light and portable, easy to use, gorgeous to behold, and endowed with the fantastic ability to morph into a tablet at the drop of a hat.

The Pixelbook comes in a sleek aluminium silver with a white glass top to break up the design.

Inside, youve got a very flat keyboard which is really comfortable to type on and never feels cramped, despite its small size.

I found it easy to work on all day long (although I did grow frustrated of the tiny lag between pressing the CAPS LOCK key and caps lock actually activating, which resulted in this sort of thing: aLl of my sentences ended up looking like i Couldnt type properly.

Still, thats probably my fault for not using the shift key like a normal person.).

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