or heavyduty), robustness, what is going to be used for and security, accessories, CPU speed and memory would be a consideration as you have to sacrifice performance for battery life, and how long it will be a top performer for? Like a car they depreciate or are out of date as soon as you buy them Source(s): I look at the CPU as well as the memory. I don't worry all that much about the hard drive, especially in desktop computers, as I can always add another or just get an external. For me it's all about the memory. I open up quite a few apps that would love to eat a computer whole (3d max, adobe apps, to name a few) and if I don't have the memory to run it effectively then I may mess up an animation or a picture that I've spent quite a lot of time in.