Things you should know when choosing a new laptop

Laptop now becomes irreplaceable in day to day work of any student. There are many manufacturers with different kind of product for the end user to pick. However, it is not easy to choose a laptop if you don’t have a decent knowledge of technology, especially in computer science.  
In this article, I will give you some advice on how to choose the most suitable windows laptop for yourself (with MacBook, you don’t really have the option). There will be four categories that I want to focus on: Design; Performance; Battery life; Durability. I will focus on university student who works with their personal computer for most of the time.

1.Design

                Over the year, the design language has changed dramatically as laptop become thinner and thinner. Inspiring by Apple’s MacBook, manufacturers have introduced laptop with around 10mm of thickness and weigh under 1.5kg. Go along with the bezel-less trend in smartphone, the screen bezel has been reduced significantly compared with those came out between 2010-2014. 

The revolution is also the main focus to meet the need of content creator. Many of mid-range laptop have 1080p screen with decent RGB and aRGB score with is enough for most day to day work and entertainment. If you are someone who works that involve with design or video editing, you might want to pump up to 2K or 4K with better color correction. And for gamer, there also many options with higher refresh rate, from 60hz up to 144hz with or without G-sync from NVidia.

The keyboard and trackpad are very important things; through which we interact with the laptop. The laptop keyboard is usually pretty shallow with short key-travel. Signature such as Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell XPS, and Dell Latitude is a few laptops which can give you the best typing experience in any laptop if we do not consider those gaming laptop with full mechanical keycap. Other than these, typing is just nowhere near the comfortable with a lot of fletches and small keycap. It is not easy to find a windows laptop with a glass surface trackpad in the mid-range product. Most of 2018 laptop ship with Windows precision driver which give you more accurate and Windows 10 gesture control. You can always use an external mouse but make sure to choose the one with a good trackpad, you will appreciate that in the future. 

And let talk about port, shall we! Even in 2018, when everybody is talking about USB type C, most accessories are using USB type A. If you don’t want to live a dongle life in the next few years, those MacBook like is not the best options. As a student, you may have to connect with other devices such as projector, TV, printer, mouse… and anything that doesn’t support Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. You will appreciate if your laptop has one or two full-size USB type A to plug in with other accessories directly. If you go for a thin and light laptop, you will have to make some sacrifice in term of port, but make it be too inconvenient.

2. Performances

 First of all, let talk about CPU aka Center Processing Unit. There would be a lot of confuse if we dive deep into this area so I am going to make this short and easier to understand. Most PC nowadays power by Intel chipset which famous for its Core I-X series. There are three level in this series: core I3; core I5, I7 in the order of performance increase. The newer generation the chip is the better value you will out from it. In addition, there are three main type of chip: type U (stand for under-voltage) which focus in extent the battery life, type H (stand for high performance) which overall provide significantly better speed and has more core to handle the heavy workload.

For those who only use their PC for Microsoft Office, surfing the internet or watching Netflix, a core I3 or core I5 type U will be the sweet deal. But for gamer or content creator you will want to get the i5 and i7 model if you want to make thing done.

Secondly, there we have graphics performance. If you don’t do things like playing modern game or video editing an integrant GPU like Intel HD and UHD is enough for you. Another thing you should be considered is that in GTX series, Max-Q design is a mode version of the GPU with better thermal but lower power.

3. Battery life 

                Most mainstream-laptop on the market have respectful battery life. By using U series CPU, you are going to have from 4 to 12 hours. For gaming laptop, manufacturers have to make sacrifice in term of battery life to make room for the performance.  Laptop does not have the option to change the load from the external GPU and the integrant GPU only last around 2 hours due to the power-hungry component. One more thing to keep in mind that battery life heavily depends on how you use your computer but for day to day normal workload, a three-cell battery is pretty much enough for you.

4. Durability

                As far as I have seen, the two most popular brand among college student are ASUS and Dell. You can usually encounter product such as Dell Inspiron, ASUS Zen Book, Lenovo Idea Book… They have lower price compare to their competitor due to the lack of built quality. The chassis is made mostly of pure plastic with low resistant to drop or shock. The keyboard and the screen product a lot of flex which makes the laptop come much more less premium and durable. You should pay a little more or sacrifice some performance to have better-built quality if you did not need a lot of raw power.

What I am using right now is a Lenovo ThinkPad T450, an early 2015 business class Ultrabook. It came with a HD+ touch screen which was quite rare at that time. I did have to make a compromise with the brightness panel and the fingerprint magnet corning glass on top of it. Perform is where I have to give up the most. I’m running an Intel Core i5 5300U and no external graphic card, which was the only configuration I could afford. It has already too weak in 2018 for modern game or video editing but for normal entertainment and office work it can still handle just fine. Battery life and built quality where my laptop shines, as expect of the ThinkPad series. After three years, all the components stay in perfect shape with only little sign of worn out. I can work constantly for four hours with a single charge with my 3-cell battery.

Final though, you need to be clear of your demand before decide to buy a new laptop. Watching reviews on reddit or YouTube to have a full view about the product.