Best College Laptops

Choosing The Right Laptop For College

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I used to work in a college IT department on all different makes and models, different operating systems and Macs so I know first hand that certain manufacturers are better in quality than others.

For students in an art type of major, Architecture, Interior Design, Fashion, I would hands down recommend a Mac due to the graphics quality. But there are equally good Windows-based laptops for school that are very popular. After reading this you should have a better idea of what to look for when shopping for a laptop and your personal preferences for things such as screen size and color.

The three best brands I’ve worked on are Gateway, Dell and Apple. You’ll want to go with an Intel Core duo processor or better for speed and a minimum of 2GB of memory. If you plan on using your laptop for games or using multiple applications at the same time (toggling between open applications) get 4GB.

Hard drive size is dependent on what you plan on storing. If you are just going to be storing documents for school any of the standard hard drives the manufacturers are offering now will work. For music and picture storage you’ll want to increase the size depending on your usage. For those who store a tons of music and large pictures, keep in mind that it takes up a lot of space and will ultimately slow down your computer. So you may want to invest in an external hard drive. But for the average person, as I mentioned before, all the hard drives offered in the new laptops have a lot of space, about 250GB or more and will work just fine.

It is important to get a laptop with Wi-Fi capability as it is probably needed in certain classes and every college now offers Wi-Fi on campus and in dorms.

Also keep in mind battery life – some last just 3 hours and others last 6.5 hours or more. Video and sound are dependent on what you plan on doing with the laptop. This is particularly important to gamers but for your average student, the standard video and sound feature offered by the manufacturer will work. Personal options to decide is whether you want a webcam, if you are looking for a laptop with Windows or a Mac Operating System, the screen size and weight. There’s some laptops you can customize the color but there’s also different styles of skins for purchase as another option and perhaps less expensive. All these latter options are based on personal preference.

I would suggest going with a Gateway, Dell or Apple Macbook. However, the best laptop computer for college students is the Dell Inspiron 15R or higher. This laptop has excellent standard features with Intel Core i3 370M processor (better than Intel Core Duo), 4GB memory, 500GB hard drive, built in wireless and webcam, CD/DVD burner and 1 year warranty just to name a few options! You can also check; Best College Laptops 2010 for more suggestions.

Whichever laptop you decide to go with, all three that I mentioned above have a much better quality than others on the market, and this is based on my direct experience fixing a variety of student computers on a college campus.

Tips For Choosing The Best College Laptop

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So what exactly is the best laptop for college students? There’s no definite answer. The type of college students vary as much as the types of laptops out there. Raging from high end power laptops from Alienware to cheap netbooks from Asus, there’s a whole spectrum of laptops to choose from.

The first thing that needs to be decided is the size of the laptop. These are usually categorized into three groups: Netbook, Mainstream and Desktop Replacement. The Netbook is the lightest of all the three. It’ ssize varies from as small as a 4.8 inch screen to 10 inches (size is usually determined by the screen). The mainstream’s size usually lies around 10-15.6 inches. The Desktop Replacement is everything above 15.6, sometimes even reaching size of 20 inches! What’s important to note here is that as size increases, power and price increases as well.

The netbook is the barebones laptop category. Slim, lightweight, power efficient and cheap, these machines can do regular, everyday tasks such as surfing the internet, using word processors or watching videos. Models such as Asus EEE, Dell Inspirion Mini and HP Mini are the more common ones. These usually run from $250 to $700

The Mainstream is the most common laptop there is. Powerful enough to run some demanding applications such as Adobe Photoshop yet still light enough to be carried in your backpack. The Macbook series is the most popular college laptop in this category but its price might be too much for some. Compaq is the budget line of HP, and offers extremely good laptops at its price points. These cost around $450-$1200.

The Desktop replacement is the biggest, and most powerful in terms of sheer hardware, there is of the three categories. These are usually bulky, weighing more than five pounds and usually has a 16 inch wide screen .These laptops are usually for people who sometimes need mobility, such as video editors who do on-the-spot editing.

A subcategory of the Desktop Replacement is the Gaming Laptop, as a good number of them lie in this category, usually sporting the best hardware available to run all recent games at maximum graphical settings. These hardhitting laptops could set you back for a good $800 to a whooping $2500!

One you’ve picked from these categories, you might be presented with options to somewhat customize them. Features such as webcams and card readers are almost always present in laptops today. USB slots and the Wifi card are always provided as well. There are, of course, some things that still need to be decided upon. Usually, laptops are equipped with disk-based Hard Drives with storage spaces that run from 120 Gigabytes to a whooping 1 Terrabyte. A general rule is that if one is interested in media and games, one would usually get more space. The option of Solid state Drives (SSD) sometimes also presents itself. These drives are expensive, yet offers the fastest read-write of them all, meaning that you save time when trying to save work or launching applications. The Usual RAM provided averages at 3 Gigabytes. This is fine for most cases, but people who use intensive applications or games might want to invest a little bit more on this.

Another general rule is that more RAM will almost always make your computer faster. So if your laptop is experiencing slowdowns, it might not be a bad idea to purchase more RAM for it. The CPU is the core unit of the laptop. It determines how fast and powerful it is in running applications.

Netbooks are usually equipped with an Intel Atom CPU, as this is one of the most energy efficient CPUs for netbooks today. However, it will experience severe slowdown when running more intensive applications.

Mainstream laptops usually use an Intel Core 2 Duo, i3 or i5 or AMD Athlon or Turion, enough for most applicatons.

Desktop Replacements usually carry an Intel i7 for the most demanding of all applications, though these CPUs are pretty costly. GPUs, or Graphic Processing Units, are usually not needed by laptops as these are seen as powerdrains. Most laptops are equipped with a integrated video card that comes along with the motherboard, or is integrated in the CPU if it uses an Intel i series. However, gamers might want one for their laptops as these integrated video cards could only do so much. Both nVidia and ATI offer mobile versions of most of their GPUs, however these will sometimes never reach the same specifications as their desktop counterpart as these were designed to be as compact as possible.

This should have mostly covered the question “What exactly is the best laptop computer for college students?”. If you’re still unsure as to what to get, the best way to find out is to go to stores and try it out yourself! There’s nothing more convincing than a hands-on demo.