Welcome all to Colorado Mesa University! A university where there’s always a social event going on, small classes for a more personal experiences for learning and stairs in Escalante that could very well give you a heart attack.

Now that you’re here and learning you, just need the right tools. More specifically, a laptop computer. Before you go off and spend an insane $1,300 on a brand new Apple MacBook, please hear me out; I would almost guarantee you’ll save at least a couple hundred bucks while still getting the same if not better performance.

The reason for this is because as a Computer Information Systems for Business major, I’ve have a fair amount of people ask me what kind of computer they should get and sometimes they would brag about how they bought a brand new Mac and how amazing it is. And at least half the time, they don’t need that Mac at all. But my ASUS Gaming laptop was only $1,000 and it has much better performance than that Apple that they overpaid for.

I’ll start things off with a quick disclaimer. Unless you plan on getting a gaming laptop or gaming desktop, I would say that you shouldn’t be spending anything more on laptop above $800 dollars. Almost anything above that, you’re basically buying a gaming laptop or getting ripped off because you don’t need that much for what you’re buying.

Now for some things to look at in a laptop. One big factor that comes into play for getting a new laptop is the screen size. Almost any laptop can have a screen size within 11 inches across to 17 inches in size. If you’re a person who’s looking for something more on the convertible lightweight end then you should probably stick to something at about 13.5 inches or below. But maybe if you don’t take your laptop on the go so much I would recommend something from 13.5 inches to 17 inches.

Another factor to look at is the storage. Usually unless you download A LOT of movies or do photo/video editing, you actually don’t need a lot of storage. If, however, you are not one of those people, I would say you shouldn’t need anything more than 500 gigabytes of storage. If you however need something more, definitely don’t get anything more than one terabyte. For something a little technical, let’s look at what’s really going to give the most impact.

The biggest component to look at is the CPU (Central Processing Unit). As of now there are currently two big competitors in the processing industry, Intel and AMD.

In terms of which one is better, unless you’re really big in computers and perfectly understand what I’ve been saying so far, that’s really not important which means you shouldn’t worry about it. The part in the CPU that’s going to matter is the speed it performs at, and the amount of cores it has.

Something to keep in mind for this guide is that these are the ideal preferences for a laptop for a college student, therefore I wouldn’t expect you do be doing a lot with it as already stated. These days in the computing industry you can have a CPU with a single core all the way up to a 22-core (which is pure insanity), so for this guide, you don’t need anything more than a Quad core CPU, especially since I can do great gaming on my PC and I’m using a Quad core. Then in terms of speed, I would argue that you don’t anything more than 2.2 GHzs of processing power.

Now that you’ve successfully followed this guide to help you save a couple hundred dollars, here’s a couple of tips and hints to top things off.

I understand that in some cases you could actually just get a tablet with a keyboard attachment and in fact if that’s all you truly need, then by all means go for it. In fact I use just an iPad with a keyboard case when I go to class just for notes. And of course, for the people who like to go by brand name, be careful, and look at customer reviews for the best reference to influence your decision.