Laptop Next

We all know that one of the best and busiest times to buy a new laptop (other than black Friday) is the start of the school season. A lot of people will be in a rush to buy their new, useful toy, but not many will stop to think about what exactly it is they need. A cool looking, sleek, top-of-the-line ultrathin may not be the perfect playmate for you. Now that there is such a variety in makes, models, and capabilities, it’s not quite as easy to just go pull a notebook off the shelf. Quite a bit of thought needs to be put forth before buying your new laptop.

Think about why you need a laptop. What are your habits with your old laptop or PC? What exactly do you want out of it? Will you be traveling a lot? Can you use a smartphone on a netbook? The notes you take for your classes, will they entail diagrams and formulas? Will the noise level of your keys cause you troubles in class? All of these questions, and many more, will help to determine what notebook you should buy. Think carefully and thoughtfully about what you need and what you want.

Remember, your laptop for school is just a tool. The tools that will best help you will be one of these three – netbooks, tablets, or laptops. Even though these are very similar, each of them come with their own advantages and disadvantages. As long as your degree doesn’t require a high end computer, you shouldn’t really consider a desktop, as all the comforts (keyboards, mice, so on) can be added to a laptop.
A traditional laptop is for people who like a comfortable size.

A ‘regular’ sized keyboard can be pretty important. Taking notes on a laptop isn’t going to be very easy if you’re having to backspace every five seconds. Laptops are plentiful, and come in an array of prices. You can pick up a basic one at Wal-Mart for a mere three-hundred bucks, or you can get a super-advanced one for well over one-thousand dollars. While either one will definitely get your work done, you’ll get a much longer life with a higher end laptop.

Do your research, think of what size you’ll need and how fast you need it to be, how much space it should have, that sort of thing.

Tablets are a-whole-nother category. Tablet PCs have really come quite a long way in the past few years both in terms of price and user-friendliness (portability and whatnot). Quite a few college students prefer tablets due to the ease of drawing what your professor says. Say you’re doing something chart or graph related, any type of diagram really, it’s so much easier to simply draw it, rather than trying to write out some complicated explanation in word.

I would strongly recommend testing these little bad boys out, though. If you’re more comfortable with grabbing some paper and a pencil to draw grams, that’s fine, too. It does take some people a long time to adjust to the way these things work, as it’s been described as feeling “weird”.

Netbooks are also commonly used among college students. Netbooks’ batteries have a day-long battery life, and are small and cheap. It’s easy to see why students would go for this. Quite a few of them even come will spill-proof technology. (Quite important, all things considered).

Before you purchase a netbook, though, you will really need to spend some quality time with the model in question. It’s not uncommon for netbooks to have low screen resolution, and their small keyboard sizes can be pretty annoying. Keep in mind that watching anything in HD on a netbook will be difficult, and you’ll have to pay around thirty bucks extra to enable the HD function.

All in all, though, it really serves its purpose. A school laptop should really be a second computer, anyway, as it’s supposed to be for school. These little things are easy to carry around, get the job done, and are cheap. It’s not that hard to just watch youtube on another computer.