What to look for when purchasing a laptop or computer?

The first question when deciding on a computer for college is whether to buy a desktop or a Laptop. I can’t imagine any students recommending a desktop aslaptops are so much more convenient, for instance I am doing this report in my living room with the laptop atop of my lap as the name suggests. So like most students you have decided to buy a laptop for you course, there are tons of different makes and varieties to choose from so depending on your course if it’s something arty, a Mac is probably the more suitable, but most people pick a system that they are more comfortable with, usually the one they grew up with in school.

The most important factors when buying a laptop are CPU, memory, hard drive, battery life and a definite need for college is to have wireless network connector, as it’s the easiest way to borrow the internet. Students often don’t have a lot of time, so when they get on their laptop they try to do as much as possible. At one time they could be uploading photos to facebook, syncing their iPod, have an internet modern attached and maybe their phone is plugged in somewhere too. So I’d say the number of USB ports is very important to students today.

Hard drive space can be a problem with laptops, there often isn’t enough memory and it can be difficult to upgrade or add additional memory. As a solution to this, a number of my friends have external hard drives, these also serve as backup in case files are lost or damaged. So the space on a hard drive is important, it’s measured in gigabytes and around 80GB is standard.

The CPU of a laptop is also very important and it affects the speed at which the laptop runs programmes, a bad CPU and it could take many minutes to load Windows, I’d recommend an Intel processor. RAM is important when trying to run more than one programme on your laptop; I’d recommend a RAM of about 2GB. Most Laptops come with Windows Vista or the new Windows 7 as an operating system; these contain programmes like Word, Excel and internet explorer.

Finally I’d recommend Anti-Virus software, Norton is the most popular but you can download free ones online that work very efficiently too like AVG for example. There are more customisable internet programmes like Mozilla Firefox and Safari that I prefer to Windows Internet Explorer. I hope this helps with buying a laptop.