<p>So im looking at laptops for college and im reading the descriptions and seeing things like:
Intel® Core i3-2330M processor
4GB DDR3 SDRAM
500GB hard drive (5400 rpm)
Intel® Core i3 processor
6-cell lithium-ion battery</p>
<p>What does this mean?
What should I be looking for?
What do I need for college?</p>
<p>1) That is the tech specifications for a laptop, each line lists a computer part. </p>
<p>Tech specs usually include: the CPU, Memory, storage in hard drive, graphics processor, the DVD drive, wireless specs, amount of input/output ports like USB, display adapters like VGA and HDMI, screen size and resolution, and the battery. </p>
<p>As you can probably tell, there is a lot to know about computer hardware so it’s okay if you don’t understand everything.</p>
<p>2) and 3) depends on your needs. The budget for your laptop depends on whether you want to play games in your laptop, whether you want portability, or whether your classes require a powerful laptop. So ask yourself what you want or need for college before shopping.</p>
<p>For a typical person, the main things you need to care about are:</p>
<p>1) The processor. This determines how fast you computer can do things. It will say something like “Intel Pentium” or “AMD Athlon”, with a bunch of technobabble. There are only two facts that matter to the average user: The clock speed (look for “X GHz”. Higher X is better), and whether it is single-core, dual-core, quad-core, etc (More cores are better at handling many tasks at once: a dual-core 1GHz is about as good as a single-core 2GHz in most cases).</p>
<p>2) The amount of memory, or RAM. This will be measured in GB. Higher is better. This determines how well your computer will run large programs, as well as how many programs it can run at once.</p>
<p>3) The hard drive. This will also be measured in GB, but will be a much higher number. This determines how much stuff you can store on your computer. Higher is better, but it realistically doesn’t matter much because any modern computer has WAY more space than you will ever need, unless you want to store insane amounts of music or video on you computer.</p>
<p>4) The graphics card, or GPU. A cheaper laptop generally won’t have one. NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon are the most common brands. This is mainly an issue if you play a lot of graphics-intensive games, and the easiest way to compare them is to look up the system requirements for a few modern games and see if a given graphics card will run it.</p>
<p>Other stats, like weight, battery life, number and type of cable sockets, etc, are mostly a matter of preference, and are not really that important.</p>
<p>Just as an example, my laptop’s stats, with the important stuff bolded. My laptop was on the high end of average when I bought it in '09; it would be on the low end of average now:</p>
<p>Processor: Pentium Dual-Core T4400 @ **2.20 GHz<a href=“This%20is%20on%20the%20low%20end%20of%20average,%20sufficient%20but%20not%20exceptional%20for%20most%20purposes”>/B</a></p>
<p>Memory: 4.0 GB RAM (Standard for a decent laptop. Low-end models have 2, high end 6 or 8)</p>
<p>Hard Drive: 300 GB (Just about the lowest you’ll find these days, and still WAY more than I expect to ever use.)</p>
<p>Graphics Card: Mobile Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family (fancy way of saying none. Note the lack of the term GPU. My computer has a minimal graphics system that uses the main processor, rather than a dedicated GPU. It does fine for my purposes, but would struggle with some more modern games.)</p>
<p>Thanks that clarifys it some</p>
<p>That’s a VERY big oversimplification of how to determine performance. </p>
<p>For example, Pentium 4s from several years ago came at clock speeds of around 3 Ghz, and the latest CPUs today are still around that. Does that mean that performance has stagnated? Definitely not, modern CPUs will perform ~ 10-15 times better depending on the application, which does not account for the core count increase.</p>
<p>If you don’t have time to figure out how to decipher things yourself, I recommend asking for recommendations based on your needs on a knowledgeable computer enthusiast forum (such as overclock.net). The only issue might be that you’ll probably get lots of recommendations heavily biased toward gaming.</p>
<p>To most people, the specifications will not really matter, as web browsing/typing does not require a fast computer. Battery life, screen quality, and portability are usually far more important, and these things (for the most part) can usually be investigated by looking at laptops in a store and online reviews.</p>