Walk into any college lecture hall and instead of the traditional image of students scribbling on A4 pads, you’ll see a sea of screens with young people tapping on their keypads. Whether you have €200 to spend or €2,000 there are laptops to suit every budget. Dean Cunningham, assistant manager with Harvey Norman in Tallaght, Dublin, helped Irish Country Living in their search.
Walk into any college lecture hall and instead of the traditional image of students scribbling on A4 pads, you’ll see a sea of screens with young people tapping on their keypads.
Whether you have €200 to spend or €2,000 there are laptops to suit every budget. Dean Cunningham, assistant manager with Harvey Norman in Tallaght, Dublin, helped Irish Country Living in their search.
HP 15
Price: €379
You’re starting college. Fees need to be paid as well as accommodation and books. You don’t have a huge amount of money for a laptop, but often it’s not worth your while going for a very basic model, as it won’t be up to scratch for your needs.
A good starter laptop is the HP 15. At 15.6 inches, it has 4GB of RAM and with 500GB of space, it will hold plenty of documents. This sort of storage will allow you about 200 movies or 10,000 photos as well as your college documents.
If you have an extra €50, you could go for the HP 40, which is €429. You’ll jump up to the next-level processor, double your RAM and quadruple your storage to 2TB. Both models would be on the lower end of the scale in terms of laptops, but they will undoubtedly get the job done for you.
ASUS E402
Price: €599
Let’s step it up a notch. The ASUS E402 is going to deliver that one thing students need when they are up against the wire: speed. With this model, you are backed up with a solid-state drive, which means the storage is a lot quicker and with no moving parts inside, it’s more reliable. This is important for students who are walking around campus. It’s durable and, with a 14-inch display, it’s big enough to work on all day, but still small enough to fit into your backpack.
This speed comes at a price, though, and what you’ll find with a lot of models in this price range is that the storage will drop.
So you have a 128GB of storage, which is still sufficient for college work – but you may be storing those pictures of your summer inter-railing on external hard drives or in the
cloud.
HP Envy
Price: €999
If you want a laptop with longevity as well as some of the latest technology, you should consider the HP Envy. Sleek looking, it has a premium finish and, with a 360° hinge, the screen goes back on itself to fold over, thereby doubling as a tablet.
While this is handy if you’re browsing the web, it’s also a very useful feature if you aren’t very fast at typing.
By installing the Microsoft One Notebook on this laptop, you can write on the tablet, just like you would on a paper notebook and all your notes automatically save to your laptop.
When working on group projects, you can position into tent mode so everyone can see the document.
It also is very handy for presentations and, with a touch screen, you move through the information seamlessly.
Of course, when you are stepping up to this level, you should also expect a quality operating system. This one has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and the AMD A9 Processor.
Microsoft
Surface Laptop
Price: €1,169
You’re looking at four to six years of college and you want a quality laptop that is going to see you through. Entering into the premium laptop range, the Microsoft Surface laptop also has that sleek, premium look and, built with aluminium, it is durable as well as extremely light.
You’ll get a good 14 hours of battery life, which means you won’t need to bring your charger into college.
The starting model has a processor core i5 processor, which is the second best within the average consumer laptop market, you’ve got 128GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, which is plenty for multitasking.
If you don’t think that is enough, though, there are options to upgrade. The top model will cost you €2,549, and you’ll see a massive increase in terms of productivity.
Again, this one comes with some seriously cool technology, including the touch screen.
Macbook Pro 15” with TouchBar
Price: €2,899
Calling all multimedia students: those studying graphic design, video games, photography, music – basically any of the creative subjects. Even if you don’t buy your own MacBook, you will be introduced to the world of Apple on campus, as many multimedia courses now have these systems in their classrooms. So if you are purchasing a laptop and can reach for the sky-high prices, it does mean you will have a seamless transition from college to home.
So why does Apple demand such prices? You have the Core i7 processor, which is the big brother in terms of processing systems. You get 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and it also has a radion core graphic card. This allows you to work more quickly and smoothly on graphic programmes like Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
Whether you are in a tecchie course or not, the one thing Apple delivers across the board is longevity and reliability – and it wouldn’t be rare for someone to get 10 years out of a MacBook. When you compare that to the basic models, you will see where your money is going. It’s an investment in your college journey. CL
>> Tech talk
What is RAM?
It allows your machine to multitask. If you think about your laptop as a library, your RAM is your tables. The more tables you have, the more books you can open.
What are GB?
This is the measure of storage space on your laptop.
What is your Processor?
The brain – and the better the brain, the more your computer can do.
This is a subscriber-only article
SHARING OPTIONS: