Laptops are quite common today. They are easy to travel with, and they generally take up less space than desktops. However, with all the advantages, there are some disadvantages as well.

What are the advantages and disadvantages and what do you do about it?

1. Laptops generally cost more. Whether you are looking to purchase or repair a laptop, laptops generally cost more to purchase as well as to fix. The reason why laptop repairs cost more than their desktop counterparts, is since everything is built very compact, it is a time consuming process simply to retrieve a part from within the laptop.

2. Easier to be misplaced or stolen. We generally do not receive a phone call by a client saying “we can’t find our desktop and it has all our important data on it!” Unfortunately, it is somewhat common to happen when it comes to laptops. Therefore, we highly recommend implementing a backup solution as well as occasionally confirming the backups are taking place and backing up the correct data.

3. Broken Screen. Many people at one point or another accidentally break a laptop screen and there is a mistaken thought that once the screen is broken, all is lost. Fortunately, this is not true. Your data is stored on the hard drive, therefore if the only issue is a broken screen, you have four options:

(A) Plug your laptop in to an external monitor and use the laptop. (In effect, your laptop will be acting like a desktop, since it will no longer be movable.)

(B) Replace the screen.

(C) Extract the data from the hard drive, and place the data on another computer.

(D) Purchase a new computer

If you are in such a situation, please call or email us and we will supply an exact quote for your particular situation.

4. Lack of upgrade available. Inside a desktop, there generally is extra space to add additional RAM, hard drives, as well as additional cards (such as a modem or video card) which generally speaking is not true with laptops. By laptops, you can replace the hard drive or RAM but generally speaking, you can not add additional sticks of memory or a second hard drive. The good news is you can purchase USB devices which can do a lot of the functions of what the built in cards can do on a desktop.