Things To Think About When Buying A Laptop For A College Student

Are you thinking about getting a computer for your daughter/son that's already in or about to go to college? It can be tricky finding out what the perfect laptop for a college student would be. Here are a few tips to make the process a little bit easier.

• The first thing you should do here is to contact the college or university where your student is going to be attending.  Ask about software.  A lot of the schools offer students a free version of all the major software programs they might need.   Their versions aren’t really free.  The costs are included in school tuition.  Why pay for it twice?  If the student has access to an already paid for version, then go with that one.  This is also true about security programs such as antivirus.  A lot of colleges give it away.  Plus you know that the software the school is giving away will allow the student full access to whatever they need at school.
• The larger the screen is on the laptop, the heavier and bulkier it is to carry around.  You might be better off going with a 15 inch or an even smaller 14 inch laptop screen.  Ask the student his or her preference.  The larger 15" and even 17" laptops are heavy to carry around campus for long periods of time.  Smaller laptops will obviously weigh less.  They take up less desk space which is surprisingly small at many schools.  Remember their desks in class are tiny compared to the one in your home office. 
• Students will be using these laptops for everything under the sun, not just school work.  They will need larger hard drives.  A hard drive of 500GB or larger will make for a happy student. You should not have any trouble finding that these days. Most laptops have 500GB and larger drives now.
• I think it is wise to purchase a subscription to an online backup service like Carbonite or Mozy before the student heads off to college.  This will make sure that they have their school work backed up.  Then if the laptop breaks down, the hard drive crashes or if the laptop is stolen, they will still be able to retrieve the documents that they have already created.   Losing data is a major disaster to a college kid.  You can safeguard their data for $50-$60 per year.  That is money well spent. Another service that should work well for them is a website called Dropbox. (Dropbox is free)
• Some laptops come with a fingerprint scanner or some other form of identification security.  This is also a nice feature but not absolutely necessary.  IBM Lenovo laptops are well known for better security.
• It is probably worth a little extra to pay for a better battery for the student.  Long battery life could come in handy if there is little time for charging in between lectures.

Shop for your student's laptop today at TechTurn!

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