Best Laptop for a College Student

Video Transcript

"We are talking about what is the best laptop for a college student. There's honestly no particular brand that is a hundred percent better than any other particular brand. I mean you obviously know Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, thing like that, but to be honest, every brand makes good machines. The question is what you need it to do. So with that in mind, let me get right into it. I basically listed out three things to consider while you're researching laptops. The first thing is what are the needs and what is the purpose of the laptop? A lot of people make a mistake walking into the store when the just want a laptop, but they don't really know what they want it to be able to do. So before you ever start research anything, first determine what it is your college student needs to be able to do. If you don't know that, then you don't know where to go from there. The second thing to consider is what kind of use and or abuse do you foresee it to have to live through. A lot of people will treat their laptops like babies. They will be very careful and make sure that it doesn't get bonked around, but most people in my experience don't really care. So if the laptop is going to undergo a lot of physical abuse and torment, then you probably want to spend a little extra to get something that has a little bit more durability to it. And then the last thing to consider are the components. The components are a hundred percent determined by what you need it to do. If you need it to be able to have a lot of disk space for papers and things like that, then you need to make sure to have a large hard disk space. If you want it to be able to play video games or movies, then you need to consider finding something that has a video card upgrade in it. Do you need your college student to have Internet wherever they go? If so, a lot of laptops these days will come with built in Verizon or Sprint or other carrier wireless cards that they can go into a coffee shop or go into a quad area and be able to get on the Internet from there. Keep in mind that would come with some kind of service fee on a month to month basis. What kind of memory are you going to need? That's going to be determined by what they're doing. Are the watching movies? Are they playing games? What operating system are the running. Memory is the single easiest thing to upgrade. So I'd encourage you if they're going to be doing a lot of video graphic design type things in college, then make sure you have a good video card, plenty of memory and a good processor to go along with it. And the last thing is the operating system. I would encourage you if you want to save a little bit of cash, then make sure that you go with the XP Professional or Home operating system because it is by far less resource intensive than say a Windows Vista. As well there a Mac OS or Macintosh machines. There's are not as necessarily practical for some of the things out there, but there very good machines. Unfortunately also cost usually about twice as much as a comparable PC, so that's another thing to consider is what do you want to spend on the device."