What is a good laptop for a college student?

College Life
1

I was kinda thinking about buying a high end laptop for college next year with my tax return but I don’t really know what to look for…

I would need one that is fast and powerful since I will be needing one quite a bit with my course of study (Education/Biology) and I might want to install a few games on it so one which can run games as well would be preferred but if that drives the price way up I can do without it (I have an xbox one so I don’t NEED PC games…)

2

If I were you, I’d game on a separate desktop PC as that would not only provide the best in terms of computing power to price ratio compared to notebooks…you also won’t be dealing with serious cooling/overheating issues and much more rapid obsolescence common with supposed “gaming notebooks”. The last especially applies if you’re a gamer who must have the latest and greatest games when they are released.

Another thing to consider is having games on the same machine you plan to do academic work on will add another layer of distraction which may seriously affect your academic performance. Saw this happen to far too many college classmates and younger friends in college.

Personally, I’d recommend getting a notebook strictly for academic needs/basic internet and a separate desktop PC or relying on your xbox for gaming.

3

Asus ZenBook 305 or a base Dell XPS 13.

You want small, light and long battery.

Microsoft Store has the best deal on the ZenBook. Get the base Dell XPS 13 from Dell.

4

Macbook Pro. So you can’t play too many games. lol, but seriously.

5

A bunch of my friends with kids in college already advise waiting until you know where you’re going and checking with the school. Several of the schools will not only give you a discount but will service your laptop for free if you buy it through them. Some schools prefer Macs and some PCs, although that’s getting rarer.

6

@Pheebers that’s what we decided to do too - Wait to see which college our son will be going to. While we’d really like to do as the OP wants (buy with our tax refund,) we realized that realistically, we’d have to wait. His SCEA offers all that you said and a payment plan. We figure the other colleges he’s applying will be similar. Plus, around Back to College time, there will be student discounts everywhere.

7

It really boils down to personal preference. Get something reasonably powerful that will last for the long term, but as to what particular make/model is up to you. If you’re very familiar with Macs, that’s a good route, same for PCs. Also get something comfortable to type long documents on.

8

You know I guess I never thought about the whole distraction component haha. I probably would be kinda tempted to pull up a game instead of typing a paper…

So I’ll probably opt out of a gaming pc/laptop. I didn’t realize you could buy laptops through the university either, so maybe I’ll end up doing that.

9

Do yourself a favor and don’t game on a laptop! Unless you’re playing inexpensive Steam games or something. If you have an Xbox One, work with that for now. You can buy (or build) a high-end gaming PC when you graduate from college and have a job (or if you work in college and save up for one).

Unless you are doing some special kind of power work or analyses with the laptop you don’t really need a super fast/powerful one. There’s nothing inherently straining about an education + biology major. I agree that what you want is small and light, snappy performance for multitasking, and long battery life.

Some colleges do offer discounts, but that would be the only reason I would consider waiting. For some schools you can order the computer through the school, but in my experience colleges often put together packages that are far beyond what the average student needs - it was true when I was in school and is probably even more true now that a basic mid-priced computer can handle basic and some intermediate tasks pretty fast. And most colleges have an IT center that will do some limited service to any computer for free (or rather, you’re paying for it in your fees).

Other than that, there are a lot of great machines on the market. If you like Apple the Apple MacBook Pro is pretty light with good battery life these days, and then there’s the cheaper MacBook Air. I have an HP Spectre x360 and it’s super light and fast with very long battery life. There’s also the Lenovo Yoga series, the Asus Zenbook, and the lower-priced Toshiba Radius and the HP Envy. All the Windows machines I mentioned have touch screens and most fold around 360 degrees into a tablet, although practically speaking I almost never use that feature on my laptop.

10

Take a look at: ASUS Zenbook, Lenovo Yoga, Microsoft Surface, Dell XPS 13, and Apple Macbook. These are the most popular options since theyre are thin/portable but also have sufficient processing power for most college work. If you’re an engineering/CS/Visual Design major you might need something more powerful, though.

11

It’s important to know whether your school or field of study is PC based on Mac based. For example, if everyone in your department works on PC based programs, it’s going to cost you a lot more to get the Mac program compatibility. That said, most colleges are set up to handle both. MacBooks are great, and if you choose that, I don’t think you’ll go wrong. Choose a laptop over a notebook, especially if you need the computing power. My DD has a MacBook Air, but she told me recently that since she is a CS major, she wishes she went with a MacBook Pro.

12

I would suggest a cheap laptop. The laptop will be broken or stolen in many schools.

13

While I wouldn’t go for the most expensive gaming/bleeding edge laptop unless one’s needs require such high level of power for academic work, going cheap…especially the lower end consumer-grade notebooks from big-box stores is being penny-wise pound foolish for the following reasons:

  1. Consumer grade notebooks are where manufacturers cut the most corners and thus...factors such as build quality and QC may leave much to be desired. This makes the likelihood of the machine falling apart or even failing much sooner than would be the case with say a lower-end business/corporate line notebook retailing for around $700 to around $1200+. Incidentally, I have several such notebooks sitting in my room which clients abandoned after I found and notified them that the root cause of the problem was the flimsy construction* and/or shoddy workmanship** which meant any parts I replace would likely fail again in a short period for the same reasons.
  2. Technical specs are such the notebook is much less likely to be future proof to last more than a couple of years at most. A friend who ignored my advice because he saw a deal for a low-end dell inspiron for less than $200 a year ago is finding his notebook is having periodic slowdowns due to windows/MS office updates and guess what...the RAM is not upgradable as it's fixed at 4 GB with no further upgrade possible...the barest minimum required for the last few years if one's running a 64 bit operating system***. And his computing needs are extremely basic...office applications and basic internet surfing. And from my experience beta testing and using Windows 10...those slowdowns will likely get worse with a year or two of further updates on a machine limited to 4 GB of RAM. As I said...penny-wise pound foolish.

Many entry-level systems nowadays are starting at 8 GB of RAM with some even going to 16 GB.

  • Notebook casing which flexed so much it caused the motherboards inside to bend back and forth enough to break solder joints and traces which resulted in freezes and then total system failure.

** I.e.: Electrical shorts and even one case of arcing due to shoddy soldering of powerjacks from the factory.

*** There’s been a trend towards going to 64-bit processors(core2duo or Athlon 64 onward) since the mid-'00s and moreso since 2008-9 onward. Also, running 4 GB of RAM on a 64-bit system is the equivalent of running 2 GB on a 32-bit system…bare minimums for machines running windows Vista or later systems unless you’re quite patient about the slowdowns. I myself can be with some systems I use for extremely basic tasks such as word processing or running a simple file server. I wouldn’t recommend it for most people…especially those who want to watch streaming videos in anything resembling HD. Something which is increasingly considered basic by average consumer users.