A majority of incoming college students are stressed out. They have a completely new life ahead of them, they don't know who they're going to meet or what they're going to wear. Parents alike, are very much stressed too, not only about their child leaving, but also about how much it's going to cost them for this college experience.
Clothes, food, accessories, books, cars, electronics...the list is endless and very expensive.
Why you're here...
The main reason you're here is to get a good idea of what to buy yourself or (if you're a parent reading this) your child for college. You want the coolest looking laptop, the most features but you also want the best deal Especially if you're paying for it!
Let's get into it...
The first thing you must know: "What functions will the laptop need to perform."
General Everyday Student Use - Email, Music, Facebook, A Little Word Processing
Business Related - Everything in General, More Multimedia Usage, Presentations etc
Engineering/Science Students - A Combo of the Former Two, Strong Mathematical Computation Ability, Drafting Design Programs
Art - Ability to Render Large Image Files, General Student Use
Multimedia Station - General Student Use, Watching HD Movies, Music and Video Editing
Gamer - Pretty Much Combo of general Use and Multimedia, Heavy Gaming
What am I looking for? Some General Guidelines
Now you know a little bit about each group. Let's get into what kind of requirements you need. Keep in mind these change as time goes on and for now are pretty general.
General Everyday Student: Requirements for this are the lowest (and cheapest). You can probably even get a netbook. More about netbooks later. We recommend to AT LEAST get a current generation processor, 2 gb of ram, 150 gb hard drive and a DVD drive.
Business Related: The requirements for this group is about the same. Maybe a little bit more hard drive space 200+ and if you're looking into getting a little more performance, consider upgrading ram to 4 gb+
Engineer/Science Students: This is where the requirements change. A higher grade processor is required here - Intel i3, i5, i7 are examples; plenty of hard drive space, 6 gb+ for ram and a dedicated video card.
Art: The requirements here are similar to the engineering laptop, except the video card has to be better. There is also a line of video cards for image rendering. NVIDIA Quadro and ATI Radeon Firepro are examples. We also recommend getting an Apple computer for this. Most schools prefer them.
Multimedia Station/Gaming: These computers are considered by most to have the highest requirements. They both require the latest processors, large and quick hard drives (Fastest hard drives are called SSD and are more expensive. 6 gb+ at least, with a blu-ray CD bay drive, and a dedicated high end video card -the gaming computer even more so.
Your preferences: Screen size 11″ to 18″, Portability- this is generally covered by screen size, the larger the screen the more it weighs, Brand - Most well known brands are solid, we'll get into apple vs PC war later and style.
For now, you have a general idea of what to look for.
