The short answer is yes, you need a laptop for college for a lot of reasons.

The fact that you want to cross check the usage of laptop before straight away jumping to purchase one for yourself is completely justified. However, the basic fact remains that the world is no more a simple place to deal with. Everything in the present world is mechanized and dealt technologically. Same goes with the field of education. To have a proper answer on whether you need a laptop for college or not, you need to examine the advantages of having a laptop for college.

Advantages of having a Laptop in College:

Submitting Online Assignments: Often educational institutions ask the students to submit their assignments online. Nowadays most educational institutions ask the students to type their assignments on a laptop instead of writing it on papers. This is all to save the precious time of students and increase their technological handling of projects. Especially during the period of a pandemic, that has recently hit the world, online classes and assignments have become an integral part of the education system. Looking at such a scenario one can hardly deny the importance of laptops in college life. While doing so, you would be required to submit a lot of projects, especially if you are computer science student. We definitely recommend you to check out the best budget laptops for computer science students.

Read e-books: Reading a book on a smartphone could be a painful task for your eyes. Who does not want to have a comfortable big screen placed right in front, displaying each and every letter clearly for you to read it with enough enthusiasm and concentration. A smartphone can block your interest in the book and small cluttered letters can also make you feel drowsy at times. You get to go through a lot of material including tons of PDFs during the phase. Definitely worthwhile to invest in a tablet for that.

Digital Presentations: The Schools, Colleges and Universities ask the individual students to present a certain topic out of their course individually on laptops which is further projected on the white board of the classroom. The teachers that teach online on a laptop wants to ensure that the entire class was able to go through the presentation. This not just steps up the interest and curiosity in students about a certain study topic, but it also enhances their practice on the topic. With various researches that the students make during the construction of the project, especially when the students design the slides; the gain a lot of information and upliftment in their career. Basically, the digital approach changes the usual monotonic environment of the classroom and makes the overall process of presentation and projects very entertaining and engaging.

Making research: We all know that we can use smartphones for making small research, but such a small screen cannot beat a big laptop screen that provides much more clarity, vision and interest in the research work without tiring or stressing your eyes. If you are into a lot of research, we definitely recommend a monitor over a laptop, as you will have a bigger screen space which will cause less strain on the eyes.

Independent approach towards study: Well if you do not have a laptop and there is less scope of having one soon, you can go ahead and share a friend’s laptop whenever required. But nobody can deny the fact that what you own is your own. It is not convenient to depend on a friend for sharing a laptop all the time. What is the friend is talk with some other problem and it is not possible for him to help you out at a certain situation?

Fast note taking: Taking notes manually with pen and paper becomes not only time consuming but also an exhausting task. The conventional method of taking notes could be boring at times. Further, you have the choice of editing your notes with more flexibility and you do not have to scratch out words on a piece of paper again and again. All this saves a lot of time and effort of the students which they can later invest into sharpening their skill for even better performance in their academics. Check out the best tablets for OneNote, an app which is used a lot for note taking.

Builds Teamwork: Friends gather to form a team and complete their work with more efficiency than an individual input could bring into work. You cannot carry a static computer or desktop machine with you and meet with your friends in a cafe or a library. But with a laptop, it becomes easier for you to take it along and see your friends at a comfortable place and carry out your work in their company. This improves the quality of your input and hence results in better results.

Sharing and Connectivity: One of the best features of laptops remains its connectivity options. You can share important data files, project works, e-books online with your friends even late at night without worrying about the outdoor risks which could occur if you would have chosen to share the data with your friends by yourself. In case you urgently need to transfer a file to your friend it would take a lot of time if you choose to travel to your friend’s home and then give it to him. Instead you can just transfer the file online via a laptop.

Keeps you creative and informed: It is obvious that if you have a machine you would explore it more and more to know about it. You can come across some wonderful features of laptops and utilize it in a creative way to learn different skills and build your vocabulary, knowledge and talent. A laptop allows you to browse various topics and learn current information about those, thereby enhancing your current affairs and general knowledge about the subject as a whole.

Internships: It has become very important for students to have internship experience for their career. They have tremendous choices such as work from home and part time jobs to add experience and practical knowledge about their field of study. They understand how to apply the knowledge that they have learnt so far practically through these internships such as content creation, content writing, digital marketing, and software development require a laptop for sure. It seems a next impossible task without a laptop to develop huge files and documents without a laptop. Hence a laptop becomes a must for such students.

The convenience of having a laptop in college cannot be denied at all. The most crucial feature of a laptop remains its portability and connectivity. It not just accentuates the speed of your work but it improves the quality of it with technological assistance. So now you can have a direct answer to the question as a complete “yes”. Yes, you do need a laptop for college.

Q. What type of Laptop do you require generally for college?

Laptops of college students have various functions to perform. They not just utilized for making college assignments and projects. Students love to play games on their laptop for breaks and little refreshments, a few students work from home and hence they use a laptop for such purpose. Watching movies, listening to music and there are so many uses of laptops for a college student. Having said that, we all understand that it is not possible for you to purchase specific laptops for specific requirements.

After all, students do not generally have that budget. But you can have one laptop to balance all these requirements at once. That requires a deep analysis and prioritizing your concern and your expectations from the laptop. Basically, what you need to do is that you need to list down your requirements in a serial order starting from the most important task an ending with the most casual task that you need to perform on the laptop. This way it becomes easier for you to select a laptop that focuses on the major tasks of your college thereby keeping a balance with the casual needs.

Here are the steps you can take:

Fix your budget because fixing a budget is the most important step towards purchasing a correct laptop for your college. It would be a useless attempt to first select a laptop and then find yourself in capable of investing in it. Thus do ensure what you can invest and get for it.

Select an Operating System that goes with your college work or your internship. For example if your internship requires you to have a laptop that has Mac Operating System you would not be able to do it with the Kali Linux or any other Linux Operating System.

Choose appropriate specifications of a laptop. Each work requires a different type of CPU and GPU along with a different display size and battery life. Look for what is suitable and convenient for you to match your needs to a decent product and purchase it.

Basic Requirements of a college student from a laptop:

Curriculum matters: In case your work includes simple note taking and content creation as a student, you will definitely not require a laptop with high end specs and features. You can simply do with a decent laptop that has a good storage and RAM. In case you are a computer science engineering student the case would be opposite. In your case you will require a laptop with a minimum of i5 Processor from Intel, a good graphics support, decent storage and RAM. If you are a student from Graphic Designing a quality GPU becomes a must from you. Similarly, if you are too much interested into playing games during the break, lets say Roblox, you need to you have class graphics support from NVIDIA. Putting it all together, in a nutshell you need to understand your requirement according to your work and prioritise the specs of a laptop before purchasing one.

Display: Having spoken about the specs and features of computers we cannot ignore the display of a laptop. While you may be one of those students who loves to have huge display laptops but anything which is larger than 16 inches is definitely not going to fit in your backpack. A display can increase or decrease the overall weight of a laptop. You should select the display wisely and not simply depending on the looks of the laptop. The display should be decent in size so that you can work on it without stressing your eyes and it is very important to have Anti Glare Technology nowadays. Because, that saves your eyes from straining make sure that the display of your laptop has a good resolution to allow precise view.

Portable Laptop: If you accidentally end up purchasing a laptop that is very heavy and large in size the entire idea to have a portable device that can allow particular functions on it will be ruined. If you have a sleek laptop with good ergonomics and a lightweight design that will enhance its portability options this pack will ensure that you can carry your laptop with your friends around and it will not weigh your back down.

Q. What if you cannot spend a single penny on Laptop but you need it?

In case you are struggling financially and you do not have the capacity to purchase a laptop at present, you may instead take the help of your friend’s laptop and a good smartphone. Besides, you can save money gradually till there is a sale declared online shopping sites. Especially, in the starting of the year a lot of sale goes on and you can plan on purchasing something that suits your budget. Our suggestion would be that you should not invest too much into a particular spec if your hands are tied on your budget. For example, people give a lot of hype to the storage of a laptop which actually costs you more money. But you should understand for a student life what amount of storage is important and how you can go without investing too much into it. Similarly, a student who is struggling financially should not invest a lot into a graphics support just for playing FPS games. In other words, do not invest in any spec that costs you more money without having to do with that feature as a must.

Be careful:

Distraction and management: You must promise yourself that you are not going to get distracted with the laptop in anyway and disturb your academics. Laptops have been provided for a bigger and better purpose that is going to brighten up your future and secure you financially. You have to keep yourself from playing a lot of games and engaging yourself in multimedia.

Handle the data properly: With the advancement in technology, the carelessness in human attitudes have been at rise. You can easily mishandle any data and forget to secure it with an ID or password. Make sure that your data files are secured and safely stored in the storage of a laptop. No second person should interrupt and make unnecessary changes in your data.