Unless you’re hardly going to use the thing, you don’t want to get a small laptop. Anything under 13 inches and you’re going to hurt yourself. Eyes do not like looking at little things for very long, except for maybe diamonds. Sure you can increase the font size of stuff on the screen, but then you’ll end up scrolling yourself silly. Plus your fingers will suffer: small laptops have to squeeze keyboards into a tiny space.
On the other hand, if you’re going to be walking or biking the top, or even nuzzling it on your lap, you don’t want to be getting a big laptop. Anything bigger than 13 inches and you’re going to crush yourself. But you also need to get the weight down too: for a laptop togo, you want something as close to 3 pounds as possible.
For laptops on-the-go, you can further reduce the weight by just taking out the battery. Leave the battery at home, if there are plugins where you’re headed. The power adapter may be lighter than the battery. If you need the battery, but don’t need the extended life of a 9 or 6 cell battery, swap in a lighter 3 cell. Get a laptop with no optical drive to save more weight. If you need such a thing, just get an external one, and leave it at home. If you don’t need massive harddrive storage, reduce the weight further, by getting a laptop w/ a lighter solid-state harddrive.
For stay-at-home tops that don’t even move in the house, skip the laptop, and get a desktop w/ a big screen, or get one of those all-in-1s that look like they’re just screens, and have somehow hidden a tower inside themselves. If the top is going to move around in your house, and only travel by car, then you may as well get something w/ a big screen that moves, ie. a big laptop.
You are going to be looking at your laptop. There is no way around that. Eyes do not like looking at the sun. Glossy screens will deliver the sun into your eyes, especially if you like to work outside. Try a matte screen or a matte coat for your laptop if you’re glare-bound.
You have to type with your top. Make sure you can type all the keys easily. Especially test the shift keys and the return key and whatever other key you’re likely to hit with some regularity.
If you’re not a mouser, and like the trackpad, really test it. Left-click, right-click, paste etc. Is it so big that your wrists and arms are actually moving the cursor ? Is it so inappropriately sensitive that you keep triggering click events w/ your sleeves ? Can the blasted thing be disabled completely ?
The carpenter with big pockets doesn’t have to go back to the van. Even if you never use your laptop, make sure it has decent-sized pockets or 4GB of RAM. And make sure it has a 64 bit processor, otherwise it can’t even use all its pockets. The low-end of any current processor family (i3 for eg.) will due for emailers, surfers and typers.
If you want to avoid waiting for your laptop to wrestle itself away from whavever it is doing, and respond to your latest click, or if you’d like your laptop to really move at a nice clip, then 1st: get more pockets, say 6 or 8 GB. Next, choose a medium-level (i5 for eg.) of any current processor family. A dedicated graphics card is your next improvement: without one, your laptop has to handle graphics by itself. This is like sending someone out to the forest to cut down trees w/ a steak knife. USB 3.0 is like sticking a big firehose on the side of your laptop: stuff can go in and out of the laptop much quicker. Make sure you’re not stuck w/ USB 2.0. Finally, get a solid-state harddrive, which is just another electricity-based chip. Regular harddrives have mechanical parts. It’s not a bad idea to picture a windmill and an electric fan when comparing regular harddrives and their solid-state cousins. Solid-state harddrives mean your apps (and the computer itself !) will start faster.