If you're not a gamer or media wrangler, you might prefer a new Ivy Bridge laptop for the 20 percent increase in battery life. Intel has stated that these power savings can add as much as an hour to your laptop's battery life, so Ivy Bridge laptops may be ideal for road warriors and others who want their laptops to last all day on one charge.

Finally, buying an Ivy Bridge laptop has another advantage that has nothing to do with the processor itself. Updated laptop models and new laptops often come with other upgrades besides the CPU: The latest graphics cards, more hard-drive options, thinner and lighter designs, and so on.

Perhaps you don't need the latest and greatest laptop model. If you don't play games on your laptop or work with media files--and if an extra hour of battery life won't make much difference to you--you can save hundreds of dollars buying an "older" laptop as retailers try to clear their inventory to make way for the new models. Some Sandy Bridge laptops are just a few months or weeks older than the latest Ivy Bridge ones and may be perfectly suitable for your needs.

For example, you can get a 15.6-inch Asus laptop (model A53SD-TS71) with a quad-core Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor, 4GB of memory, a 750GB hard-drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GT610M graphics card for just $750 at . The laptop dropped to its new lowest price in April, right before Intel launched Ivy Bridge.