← SLIDESHOW: What to Look for When Buying Electronics on Black Friday

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By Marcia Wade Talbert | Published November 23, 2010 | Full size is 500 × 320 pixels

Hunt for newer processors I’m noticing, a lot of the laptops I see [on Black Friday sales] have older processors like the Celeron and Pentium," says Bradford. "Keep in mind that with an older processor, you’re basically getting a very big netbook; they are good for basic stuff, but not for anything taxing." You can get a regular sized laptop with an older processor for $300 to $600. These are great for people who won’t need them for much outside of checking email, surfing the web, or word processing, but they aren’t powerful. If multitasking, graphics, and high performance are important to you, look for laptops with the newest Intel chips which are Core i3, i5, and i7. “The lowest processor I would get in the generation before those would be Core2 Duo from Intel,” she says. Many laptops come with Windows 7 and it is very resource intensive. If you are using an older processor you might not get the performance Windows 7 is intended to have.

Hunt for newer processors I’m noticing, a lot of the laptops I see [on Black…