College Laptop

Northern lassie

Hi All

Looking for a bit of advice for the best laptop for my son. He's hoping to go to college in September to study Engineering and wants to get a lap top that will last him for 4 years. Will spend up to €900 - most of it his own money!

At the moment he's looking at:
Macbook Air 13" which is $999 but comes with own version of microsoft office so would save money there
or else this one
Dell xps 13 without the touch screen which is $799.
Cant post links as new user.

One question should he go for 8gb of ram or do you think 4gb would be sufficient.

We have family that travel to US regularly and could bring the laptop home for him avoiding duties and charges.

Anything else you'd recommend?

Thanks.

Tombi!

Here's the thing with engineering courses (and some other courses), he needs to make his mind up where he'll do his work.
Most Engineering courses use CAD (computer aided design) and they require strong computers - a laptop that could run CAD well would cost you about 1400-1500 euro. At least. And even then, that might start only in his third year. By then we'll have much new computers and his nice shiny powerful laptop is going to be useful but out of date.
If, on the other hand, he's just using it for notes/internet/general casual use, then he could easily get a laptop now that would last four years (he might need to get a replacement battery in about two years, though). Which costs around 40-60 euro depending on the laptop maker.

So, when it's for college, is it just for typing up assignments, looking at stuff online (things most college students would use a laptop for) and he'll do the heavy duty work on computers in the college?

Northern lassie

More than likely the CAD aspect will be left for the college computers. Main priorities are battery life, weight, power, ram and screen resolution. Storage isn't a huge deal as can buy externally.

Tombi!

Get him to go to PCworld (or any shop that has laptops out in the open) and le him get a feel for keyboards. Some of the smaller ones can be very difficult to type on.

He might want an ultrabook since weight is important; the good news is they usuall have better battery life.
I'd urge at least 8GB of RAM, especially for four years.

Now onto the bad thing of ultrabooks; not all of them have removable batteries so in about 2-4 years, his battery life will decrease unless he replaces the battery.

I'm guessing he has to have it by sepember/mid september?

Ilikesheep

If he's going to be doing CAD and heavy CPU tasks in college my advice would be to go to the pc building and upgrading forum where they will spec the PC. Spend 500 on the desktop and 500 on the laptop.

16GB of ram, i5 processor, SSD will make a huge difference and he'll have the comfort of staying up half the night where he will be living instead of going into college to have to work. He'll also have a decent laptop as well. In his third and fourth and fourth year staying up all night is a normality in college to get your assignments done . Especially in engineering and I.T