Important factors for buying a Laptop

The course I am doing in college is Applied psychology so there are a number of factors that should be considered when buying a laptop.

Firtly it should be lightweight and fairly compact. Because I have to bring my laptop around with me from my house to college everyday to do work and assignments it needs to be light enough that it won't weigh me down too much and small enough that it will be able to fit into my bag without taking up too much room that nothing else will fit.

Another important thing to consider when buying a laptop is the screen size. It is very annoying having a laptop with a small screen, everything is smaller and you fit less onto the screen than when you have a larger screen, my old computer had quite a small screen but my new one has a much bigger screen which is comes in very handy.

Thirdly it is important that your laptop has at least 1 GB of RAM. RAM stands for Random Access Memory and is the most common type of memory found in computers. RAM is related to the speed of your computer: the more RAM you have the faster your computer will be able to process information. If you don't have very much RAM your computer will run a lot slower than other computers.

Space on the Hard disk is also very important when buying a laptop. The hard disk runs a lot slower that RAM, about 1 million times slower but its size is a lot bigger and it is far cheaper than RAM. Another difference between RAM and hard disk memory is that Hard disk has non-volatile memory meaning that it retains all its information when the computer power is turned off.

It is also important that your laptop comes with all the necessary ports. One of the most important ports on a laptop for a college student is a USB port, others are required less often such as HDMI cable ports, VGA ports, but things like earphone ports and the LAN port are needeed for everyday use.

Relating to the the above point, if your laptop doesn't have a LAN port, or just for convenience sake, it is handy to have an intergrated wireless adaptor for wifi. This is a lot more useful for connecting to the internet if you are bring your laptop from place to place or are far away from another LAN port to connect your laptop to.

Something that could also be a deciding factor for choosing a laptop is if it has a CD drive. CD drives are very useful for running programs on your laptop but having one in your laptop increases its size significantly. Graphic cards are also essential for a laptop. A graphics cards take data from the CPU and turns it into pictures, without it the screen would be blank.

Writing this up and looking up the information I learnt a lot about computers and I think it will help me again when buying a new computer in the future.