If you are looking for a good, all purpose college laptop you’ll be presented with an awful lot of choices. We’ll help you sort them out and make the best decision.



What Am I Looking For

Everyone expects something different out of their computers. Some people play games day and night, while other use their computers for little more than making Christmas Cards. This article is intended for building a well-rounded laptop where price and performance are both optimized. This way, you can still play some games, while staying within a budget.

The CPU

The central processing unit (CPU) is the brains of the computer and likewise it can significantly increase or decrease the performance (and price) of a laptop. For instance, some CPUs can be bought for about $200 while others are well over $1000. For a college laptop, you’ll want an Intel CPU (AMD, the other manufacturer is nowhere near as good) and you’ll want a speedy one. When you are configuring your laptop, picking the 3rd best in line processor is a good rule of thumb. The top of the line processor provides slight performance increase for a huge price increase, and the second in line does similar. However, by about the 3rd best processor in the lineup price and performance are both reasonable. As of the writing of this article, I would not go with anything under 2GHZ and I would ONLY use dual core (or more) processors.

Memory (RAM)

Next to the CPU, memory is probably the most important constituent of your new laptop. In other words, you’ll want plenty of it. For a college laptop, get 2 gigabytes (GB) of the cheapest memory you can from your system builder. In other words if they offer two kinds of memory pick the cheapest, just make sure you get 2GB. While it will be a slight performance decrease, it will hardly (if at all) be noticeable.

Video Card

Unless you plan on plopping down thousands for a graphics subsystem (if you are like most college students you don’t) you are never going to get really superb gaming performance out of a laptop. There is a lot of reasons for this, one being current technology another being form factor and size. That being said, spending tons on a video card that really isn’t going to give you a great gaming system doesn’t make sense. NVidia cards outperform AMD (ATI) cards across the board, so chose a laptop with a NVidia card and get the cheapest 8 series card you can (8500M, 8600M, etc). It will run windows fine and perhaps even a few, undemanding games, but it should also help your battery life and keep the system price way down.

Hard Drive

Notebook hard drives have a small form factor and as such are more expensive than desktop hard drives. In college, you generally won’t need your entire music and movies collection when you are carrying your laptop around to classes but extra space is nice when you are in your dorm room and want to listen to you 16,000 (legally) acquired songs. The solution is to buy a fairly small drive for you laptop and save a few bucks (about 100 gigabytes) and then buy an external USB hard drive for all your media (500GB external hard drives can be found online at under $100 now).

Size

When it comes to portable laptops (the kind you want to be lugging around to classes) smaller is better. Having a fancy, 17-inch display is nice, but the added weight and bulk make it unpractical. If you plan on taking your laptop to classes and the library, you really don’t want one larger than 15.4 inches and even that is pushing it. Hewlett-Packard has some reasonably priced systems at 14.2 inches and Dell even has one at 13. There comes a point where it costs a lot more to get a smaller system (just like laptop hard drives where are more expensive because they are smaller) so price wise a 15.4 inch is probably the best. However, if you are going to splurge, getting a smaller laptop is a good place to do it.

Accessories

There are literally thousands of accessories you can pair up with your new laptop, however, probably the most practical one is a wireless notebook mouse. Touchpads on notebooks aren’t the most user friendly technological items on the planet, and a decent mouse can solve those problems. Prices range from $20 to $70 so shop around and get whatever one that you like the best. Keyboards and mice both depend on your personal preference, so I’m not going to presume and tell you which one to get

Where to Buy

Sony, Dell, and HP are all well known laptop-building companies and if you look around you may find a more competitively priced smaller company who can do the same thing. At any case, make sure their service is rated highly and buy online. I say buy online, because if you run down to your local Staples and attempt to buy a Sony laptop, you’ll end up paying a lot more for a lot less. Sometimes you won’t even have to pay tax if you buy online.