What to look for when buying a laptop

When buying a laptop, many factors need to be taken into consideration. First, you would need to decide what the primary function of the laptop or PC is going to be and choose a model suited to this function e.g. gaming, downloading etc. For our course, we would need to consider several factors, because we work with programmes such as Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as the normal requirements of a college student’s laptop.
A high performance laptop with a large hard drive (250 GB +) and RAM (6-8 GB) would be ideal, as this allows students to work on several programmes at once and there is no shortage of storage space and memory for important assignments and lecture notes. Specifications suited to gaming laptops would also work well for our requirements (i.e. graphics cards/video cards) as the multimedia side to our course requires high performance graphics and fast processing. A long battery life is essential for any laptop to allow for work on the move and while studying away from college. As far as operating systems are concerned, there is no real preference for students, whether its Windows 7, XP or Vista. All provide the same basic system, with slight variations and improvements. Brands are entirely personal preference again, but I would highly recommend Toshiba and Dell.
But essentially, what a DL141-er wants is a reliable laptop with a large hard drive and a decent working memory with high speed performance for multitasking aka swapping between their Facebook page and that assignment that was due last week. :)