Super important and often overlooked. You’ll be using your laptop outdoors and the sun will be shining right into the screen. Anything less than 300 nits can not be seen.  While the Panasonic ToughtBook and a few HP business laptops can be purchased with a 1000 nit screen, most other laptop manufacturers will offer 300 nit screens if you search for them.  I also recommend getting a “matte” screen whenever possible instead of the “glossy” screens often found on tables and convertibles. The sunlight reflections can make a glossy screen impossible to see outside no matter how bright the screen is, so stick with non-glare or matte screens.

While very much a personal preference, my choice is a 14″.  The heavier a laptop is the more likely it will break when it goes into free-fall.

17″ screens are too big and heavy. period.

15″ is a good size but even the lightest will weigh 4 lbs.

14″ is the perfect balance in size and weigh at about 3 lbs.

13″ is the smallest you should use, and can weigh only 2 lbs.

Do you ever use your laptop on the airplane?  If so think about the size as anything greater than 14″ is really hard to open and use in economy class.

To me it doesn’t matter what brand you buy, what’s more important are the features and ports you get.  I tend to look towards “business” laptops because they carry the most ports. And so that leads me down the path to HP, Lenovo and Panasonic toughbooks. Business laptops also have good warranty options. That said I have no desire for any Dell laptops, they just don’t seem to have the port selection I want.

Lenovo – For apple lovers you’ll be happy, but for many PC users be aware their Thinkpad line of laptops have the Fn and Ctrl keys reversed!  This drives me nuts and while it can be flipped in the bios, you can’t swap the keys physically.

Short answer is an Intel i5, i7 or the new AMD Ryzen 5,7 processors. Too often I see people buying the fastest laptop they can find, only to suffer from short battery life, heat problems and loud fans. I’ve also seen people buy the cheapest laptops only to suffer from really slow performance. The i3 is the slowest processor I can recommend. Say no to the Intel Atom, Celeron or Core2 or any other slow processor because your computer will just crawl and never run. The i7 processor is the fastest you will find, but they tend to create more heat and you end up with less battery life. The ideal processor is the i5 because it has the best balance of speed and battery life. There is one exception for when you might choose an i7 over an i5…. when you want a larger SSD (solid state drive) and the factory only puts those in laptops with an i7 processor.

AMD just released a new processor that is worth considering called the Ryzen 5 & 7 processors. These chips should be less expensive by $200 than a comparable Intel and include much better onboard graphics than any Intel chip. I’m a big fan of AMD chips and when their 7nm chip gets released later in 2020 it will be a game changer. Be careful not to purchase an older generation A8, A10 or A12 processors.

 8GB. There is very little reason to need more than 8GB unless you have non-motorsport programs like video editing and CAN, which then I’d recommend getting 16GB.  Be careful that some newer and smaller laptops have the memory soldered onto the motherboard and may not be expanded later on. So choose wisely.  4GB is just not enough.

Short answer is to get the biggest SSD you can afford. You want a SSD, also known as a solid state hard drive, because they are so much faster than the older disk type hard drives. A minimum size of 250GB and if your budget allows get a 500GB or 1TB.  If you can customize your laptop, consider getting the cheapest driver possible, and replacing it with a SSD aftermarket. This can save you $500-$800.  Sometimes the 500GB size is only offered with an i7 processor, and sometimes manufacturers want too much money for it. You will often find it cheaper to buy the SSD separately, after you purchase the laptop, even though you will need to install it yourself. It’s also nice to save the old hard drive as a backup should you ever need to reinstall your OS.

Note: Video can take up to 50GB of space each weekend for a 2 car team. So most teams will use a separate 1 TB or 2TB external USB drive for storing video files. I recommend staying away from the 4 TB drives as they get to be too thick and heavy to carry around.

Not all that useful when it comes to a data computer. Often the smaller screen size is a downfall and the larger screen sizes weight too much. Tablet’s also don’t sit very well on top of the roof of a race car, so setting it down in or on the car can be difficult.

There are some attractive 2 in 1 or convertibles out now which give you the best of both worlds. Just pay attention to the port selection.  Stick with a convertible instead of a tablet only.

Unfortunately you don’t have much choice here. Almost all laptops come with Windows 10. As often the case for older racing electronics, some of the software you might need to use won’t work on Windows 10 so you might consider the older Windows 7 operating system. It’s much harder to find on a laptop, but there are some “business laptops” that still offer it through HP, Lenovo and of course the Panasonic Toughbooks.

No, and yes.  Very little motorsport software will run on a Mac, in fact almost nothing will. But you can use the Apple Mac hardware and run windows on it. Either through Bootcamp or a VM (virtual machine) software like Parallels or VMware. The only snags you might encounter will be getting the correct “drivers” installed for your dongle adapters like a USB to Ethernet or Thunderbolt to Ethernet. Therefore make sure you have your drivers installed and tested before getting to the track !  There’s nothing worse than showing up at the racetrack with a laptop that won’t communicate to the car!