How to Select a Good Laptop. Interface matters!

I'll go over the points that I think are more unique to my laptop selection first, the rest is rather obvious.

Try the physical user interfaces!  Except for gaming, and some content creation, the rest doesn't matter much.

Trackpad:


1.  The trackpad should let your finger move freely over it. If it is textured for style, it may not perform when you are using it.
2. The trackpad should have edges to let you know when you moved your finger out over the way.
3. There should 2 discrete buttons, that are next to eachother, so you can press both at the same time with a single finger.     (pressing both mouse buttons at the same time is a shortcut to cancel your current mousing activity),  pressing both mouse buttons can also be interpreted as an additional action (3rd mouse button).
4. The buttons should not be "integrated" with the trackpad.. if it is all one piece of plastic, then it will be harder to cancel an unwanted cursor movement.

Screen:
5 the screen: should be non-glare MATTE,   NOT GLOSSY.   If you see your reflection in the monitor, this laptop will give you much pain and suffering.

Body:
6: the body: should feel sturdy... it's ok if it looks somewhat cheap, some designers put more time into making the object function..  The body should not flex when you twist it.

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Switches
7: Hardware switches:
volume key, if you can actually control the volume immediately with a knob, this laptop is great!
Hardware wifi on/off   I don't trust the software only..

8: unadvertised features matter more than some other features:
Virtualization in the cpu.  I only recommend laptops that have virtulization enabled.    This will let you run other operating systems at the same time, which is amazing, and cool.  This is a bit harder to lookup, because they don't advertise this on laptop cpus.



The stores:
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At Fry's:  I would not buy a single laptop they had out there.  Either some sort of fingerprint reading device is disrupting the functinality of the trackpad, or the buttons are spaced far apart, or the trackpad is textured like sandpaper.
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At office stores,  they typically have just one or two models with non-glare screens. If the mouse buttons work, this is great.




I order things this way:
use
interfaces
price
size
performance
battery


Screen type by usage:
MATTE

Do everything:
I prefer smaller laptops with high resolution displays. (13in and smaller, with sxga or wsxga  )  (1400x1050 sxga+ is what my 13in  laptop has, and it is great. but I could get away with 1280x800)

I always plan to be near a plug, and buy an extra power adapter.  I typically go for discrete graphics level performance (AMD now has on chip 3d acceleration which is probably good enough)  but I want a discrete video chip and discrete video memory.

Take everywhere:
 My dell mini 9 is just great.. it has a 9 inch screen with 1024x600 resolution. It was cheap, and it is fast... It is enough of a laptop to do anything I need but 3d editing and games  or video editing(which is what I need to do :(

Poor eyesight:
If you have poor eyesight, you might select a 15 in panel with 1280x800

HD Video Editing:
Ideally, I would like to have a WUXGA 1920x1200 display if I am going to be doing anything with HD video.  (this would probably be a 17in laptop)


Interfaces:

I perfer dual pointing device laptops with the touchpoint and the trackpad.