Laptops are getting ever cheaper and are crammed with technology to tempt you. But how much should you spend? And which features should (and shouldn't) you be looking for?

1. Deciding what you want

There are two ways to look at buying a laptop. You can either go by price point or you can choose on features.

Choosing by price isn't as surprising as it sounds – there are some fantastic deals to be had both online and in the high street.

What type of laptop do you want?

A decent enough laptop can be had for under £500. You can get a good sized screen which may not be super high quality, and a reasonable battery life from budget machines these days.

They're fine for surfing the web and running office apps.

Around the £600-£700 mark you'll get an awful lot more for your money. Look for a fast processor, a decent sized hard drive and a high resolution screen with good colour contrast.

Ultraportables are just that. These lightweight laptops that are ideal for on-the-go use.

They may not be super powerful – although there are a lot of dual core ultraportables these days – but they should offer good battery life and weigh in at under 2Kg.

A new class, dubbed 'Ultra Mobile PC' or UMPC, currently consists of the Asus Eee PC and the HP Mini Note, with new competition on the horizon.

These are very cheap laptops that are incredible small, but even less powerful than the traditional ultraportable. They may not, for example, even have a CD drive.

Desktop replacements are the most expensive. These are best-in-show laptops that have the most powerful processors and graphics options.

They are not designed to be moved out of the home, but are ideal for situations where you may not have the room for a desktop machine. Some desktop replacements are specifically designed with gaming in mind.

Both major chip makers have released dual core laptop processors that are more power-efficient than ever. AMD has released the Turion X2, Intel and the Core 2 Duo.

Generally speaking, Intel machines are more power-efficient and quieter, but AMD machines are better value for money.

These are the two processors that you should be looking out for in everything but the very low end of the market. Here, the Intel Celeron M and AMD Mobile Sempron processors fill the gap.

These are perfectly capable chips, but are not suitable for things such as photo or video editing.

Does it have integrated or dedicated graphics?

Integrated graphics are part of the motherboard chipset.

These standard graphics offerings tend to be good enough for most purposes, but for applications such as gaming and video editing you need to turn to dedicated graphics from a company such as NVIDIA or AMD.

Most Centrino notebooks come with integrated graphics, so you'll have to investigate the level of graphics that a laptop has.

NVIDIA has the Go 7 and 8 series, ATI the Mobility Radeon HD2xxx series. Lower end chips are still available, but if you want dedicated graphics, these are your best options.

What kind of screen do you want?

Ultraportable laptops usually have a 12.1-inch screen. Standard laptops will have 14.1-inch screens often, but there is a definite move towards 15.4-inch widescreen laptops, the idea being that not only do you get more screen real estate, but they're better for watching DVDs.

Larger desktop replacements are likely to have 17-inch or even 19-inch displays.

Some desktop replacements also come with a coating, which can be called something like 'ultra-clear' or 'super-bright' or 'X-Glass'.

This increases the colour contrast and quality, at the expense of making the screen very reflective.