CA Report on Buying a Computer

What do you need a laptop for? Games? Research? Assignments? Fun? Probably all of the above. One or two options more so than others.

So what do you need on your laptop in order to make doing all of these things possible. Probably the most important thing to look at is RAM. How much will you need? That all depends on how fast you want things to go. It’s likely a student will need the laptop for assignments so a huge amount of RAM isn’t necessary but having a laptop that is quick and efficient could be the difference between making the deadline and missing it completely! Obviously you will be working within a budget but you can always buy more RAM if you need to. It’s also likely you won’t be buying a new laptop for a long time so you would need to consider a machine with upgradable memory. This means that as technology advances and becomes more demanding on your machine, you can upgrade the memory to cope.

You also need to consider how much you may be saving onto the hard drive. If it is for assignments etc, you will need a big enough hard drive assuming it will be the only laptop you buy for the duration of your college education. You can always buy a back up drive if you need to.

The applications on the laptop are very important as well. If you want to use it for college work, you will definitely need Microsoft Office. Word and Powerpoint are used all the time so spending the money on the software is well worth it. Other applications that might be useful are Photoshop and Illustrator. They are not essential products to have though and are very expensive so unless you have a huge chunk of change lying around, it is probably not worth buying them. The internet is another option you need to think about. You will need it – for working, procrastinating, chatting etc – so you will need to research what internet provider you want to go with, what type of internet server (Internet Explorer, Mozilla etc) and whether you want to be able to use it on the move or just in your home.

Another thing to consider is price. You should have a budget and try to get exactly what you want from a laptop within this limit. There is no point spending a small fortune on a laptop with fancy applications on it that you won’t ever use – its better to spend the extra bit of money on extra RAM or a bigger hard drive or even a machine that is lightweight if you intend on carrying it around.

Reliability is also important to think about. You need to consider who to buy from and what make. Who is most popular for being a good laptop company? Should you spend less money on a lesser known model or spend a bit more on a machine that is made by a reputable company? You’re more likely to get a longer warranty with a well known company and as a student, that is something that should be a big factor in your decision.

Possibly one of the most important things to consider when buying a laptop is the battery life. There is no point in having a fancy laptop with all the applications and programmes and super quick internet access if the machine can’t run for more than 30mins without having to be plugged in. Having said that, if you are really only using the laptop in your home for college work, it won’t matter too much if you have to plug it in. But if you want to at least have the option of bringing it to college or the library or even a little coffee shop for a change of scenery, you will want to be fairly sure you can continue working for a while before you need to plug yourself in again.
Lastly, for when you are taking those all important breaks from working, you need to be sure the screen size of your laptop will suffice for watching movies, clips on YouTube, music video’s and playing games.