Best College Laptops

Choosing The Best Laptop For College Students

5 Comments

Editors note: This post was submitted by one of our readers; Marc JH

It can be a daunting task these days to decide the best laptop for college students. Are the more expensive ones better? In a lot of cases, it may not be so true. For most college students, cheaper is going to be better. And, with todays disposible socitey, this is a good rule of thumb for laptops.

The average college laptop will only have a life of a few years at best. Let’s face it, that can of soda that dumped into it sure didn’t help to extend that life any. Neither will the fall off the table at the Student Union Building. So look for a good, tough laptop that does not cost a fortune, as you will probably need to replace it at least once before your college career is over.

A new trend is to go with a Netbook, or an ultra small version of a laptop. And there are good and bad points on these. One, the lower price is a good incentive to check them out. And the smaller, lighter size is another good point. But most of them do not have CD/DVD drives. So using any type of software is out of the question unless you can access it online too. And the smaller screen on a killer crunch study night could get to be annoying as well. It is probably better to go with one of the smaller screens on a regular laptop.

There are also some very light and very well equiped best college laptops out there that come with a hefty price for their portability. These are high-end models, that will cost a considerable bit more. There again, you will have to make the final decision on what you are willing to spend, and these loaded laptops are wonderful, but the price is a concern, and if you are looking at possibly replacing it half-way through your college experience is that going to be worth it, having enough memory to download half the documents in the free world, or play the latest, most graphics intense version of a video game? Really, do you NEED 1,000 songs on there? Get a smaller, less costly version for your college classes, and get that big old beast after you graduate!

Most of the budget laptops are bulkier, and do not have alot of the features that will allow you to be a gamer on them, but if you are just looking for a basic laptop to take to and from class and use for your studies, there are some GREAT deals out there. Check the “Bigbox” stores, as well as online sites, as they will often put out internet-only deals that can save you a ton of cash! Watch the advertisements, and go to stores and look around. See what is out there, and make notes of the ones that you might be interested in. Start a little bit before you need it, like at least a month before you go to school, so that you can price shop, and get the laptop and get it set up and ready to go and be familiar with it before you have to use it in earnest.

One thing that I think I would avoid however is purchasing a USED unit. Those can be tricky. Even if they are certified that they are refurbished, do you really want to take a chance on that laptop with ALL of your term paper in it crashing and dying? I think that new would be the best choice here. Yes, new ones can crash too, but you do get tech support for usually one year, so there is at least a hope that you might can recover something.

Deciding the best laptop for college students really has to depend on the student and the budget that they are willing to put out there! Deals can be had, it takes a little effort, and you have to keep your eyes on the prize. Go for lower costs, and less bling, and you will have a nice little unit that will serve you well! Good luck, and happy shopping!

Reader Question: What do YOU look for in a college laptop? What features are important to you?

5 Comments

jimmyjay

October 13th, 2010 at 8:02 am    

The things to check when purchasing the laptop are:
RAM speed.
Performance of the motherboard.
Disk space.
Graphic card.

Ram speed is very important because you might have a lot of applications to run. Ex: if we are working on SQL server database it will take up lot of system performance, in this case if the Ram speed is high like 4GB it will not effect the performance.

Vike

October 14th, 2010 at 7:21 am    

Students particularly college going students requires a light weight laptop with lower price, because they have to carry laptop class to class and anywhere in campus. No doubt processor and RAM speed matters a lot. 13″ or 14″ screen size is suitable for them. They should consider at least 320GB harddisk because they have to store assignments as well as songs/movies and images too. A nice graphics card should be available with the laptop so that they could play high graphics games.
Apple’s Macbook is ideal for a college going students.

sir mar

October 14th, 2010 at 1:14 pm    

1.The main advantage of laptop over desktop is mobility.
2.The laptop should not be easily affected because of rough-handling i.e.falling down, hitting hard surfaces and getting scratches while carrying.
3. The battery backup is very important as the laptop may be used in places where there is no power source available.
4.The hard disk space should be more for storing large information.
5.The RAM size should be more for fast performance.
6. The processor should be supporting high speeds.
7. Inbuild Webcamera is an added advantage for video conferencing.

Larry

October 14th, 2010 at 1:28 pm    

RAM or Random Access Memory is one of the most essential factors before considering buying a college laptop. A RAM of about 2 GB is more than enough if the student is not much into gaming and streaming of videos. The laptop being considered for purchase should be ultraportable, i.e. it should be ideally small in size and extremely light as far as the weight is concerned. The networking with respect to Wi-Fi connection, LAN and Bluetooth has to be excellent because it enables transfer of files very easily.

chrisinsocalif

October 15th, 2010 at 6:14 pm    

A laptop with a decent GPU that has its own video memory rather than use the shared system memory, a high resolution screen, A multi-core CPU would help with multitasking. Memory size I prefer is 4+ gb, an SSD drive would give the best performance or a 7200 rpm mechanical with 300+ gigs. Other options I would include would be Wifi b/g/n along with Bluetooth 3.0, 4 usb 2/3.0 ports, an Hdmi port, a blu-ray drive or burner(slot loading would be ideal), audio ports, RJ45 gigabit port, Windows 7 64 bit, Bluetooth, and a 9 cell battery.

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