Best College Laptops

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.