Choosing the right laptop can be a challenging task for students, in this laptop buying guide for students we will tackle this challenges and help you make the right choice. Let’s begin!
What makes a laptop good for students?
Portable
Students need portable laptop because they are always on the move between classes and have a lot of stuff in their bags. A lightweight laptop will be a perfect choice.
For that we can conclude that the best laptop for students should be portable.
A portable laptop should:
- have a 14″ or less display ✅
- weight 1.5kg or less ✅
Good Battery Life
Battery life on laptops are affected by many factors. While battery capacity matters, two laptops can have the same identical battery capacity but drastically different battery life!
What affects battery life of a laptop ? mainly 3 factors:
Display
Laptop display consumes most of the power. Smaller display consumes less battery, we already knew we also needs portable device, and for that we already agreed that we should get a 14″ or smaller display laptop. So the smaller screen laptop is both portable and consume less battery. Perfect! 👍
Processor
Processors are major factor in battery consumption and they might be challenging to pick the right one with all the letters, numbers, brand name associated with any processor.
💡 Tip: Aim for 10th generation or newer intel processor & 4th generation or newer of Amd ryzen processors
💡 Tip: Avoid intel celeron unless it’s the only choice for your budget.
One may ask should I get Ryzen 5 5500u or i5-11500H 🤔 ?
See the letter at the end of the processors’ names , H, U? Let’s know what does it mean:
H: is always associated with Heavy duty. It the top tier in laptop but consume so much power.
U: used to mean Ultra power saver which is true, it consumes 70% less power than its H counterpart in some models. This category of processors used to be bad performer but in the recent 3 years with the emergence of AMD to the laptop market this U processors outshined the H with their performance to money ratio and became the favorite in almost all users’ categories, except gaming of course.
* There are other suffixes like X, K, KF, F, .. etc but will focus here on U because it’s the best for students. 🥇
As a student you should look for processors with low power consumption.
The best CPU for students should not exceeds
To compare 2 processors you can use CPU benchmark website:
https://cpubenchmark.net ( Use search box to get to the processor details )
Example: comparing intel i5-1155G7 vs ryzen 5 5500u :
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-5-5500U-vs-Intel-i5-1155G7
So we can conclude that a good processor for students laptop should have:
- Dual cores or better
- Consumes 15W or less
Storage
Mechanical hard drives consumes more power then the solid state drives (SSD).
Aside from the significant better performance SSD has over HDD, the power consumption of SSD is far less than HDD.
So the best laptops for students should have SSD.
RAM
Students generally use the laptop for research, documents processing, watching online videos, and some other light stuff. A 4gb ram should be enough. Keep in mind more is better but we’re talking here about students with low budget 💸
Summary
We can summarize this laptop buying guide for students and say that the best laptop for students should have the following characteristics:
- 14inch display or smaller ✅
- weigh 1.5kg or less ✅
- Has SSD for internal storage ✅
- Has a dual core processor or better and consumes 15w power or less and was introduced within the last 3 years. You can know all of these details of any processor from the CPUBenchmark link above ✅
- Has 4gb of ram or better ✅
If you find a laptop that satisfy all of these 5 parts and it’s within your budget go for it and you won’t go wrong no matter what brand it is. Good luck in your purchase 💻
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