Factors to consider when buying a PC or Laptop for a psychology course
The first things to consider before purchasing a laptop are the physical aspects of the laptop. If you are travelling a good distance to come to college five days out of the week you don’t want to be carrying a big heavy laptop. So I suggest that you go for a smaller lightweight laptop this way it will be much easier for you to carry around and you will not be weighed down.
Another aspect to consider are what tasks you will be carrying out on the laptop. For a psychology course you will be doing lots of essays so will need to have a laptop with good memory to store all your word documents and pdf files. The type of memory needed to be able to carry out these tasks is called RAM (random access memory) I recommend that the laptop should have at least 4GB (gigabytes) of RAM, this should be enough as you are now able to save files on the cloud. It’s also a good idea to make sure that the laptop has a USB port so that you can use USB keys with additional work.
It is also important that the laptop is quick and efficient at completing the tasks required, as you will have many programmes running at the same time. In order for it to be quick it’s essential that the laptop has a CPU (central processing unit) speed of 2.1 Ghz (gigahertz).
The laptop should have a decent graphic card so that programmes such as adobe photoshop can run at a high quality. This will make the graphics clearer.
It is important that the laptop has a long lasting battery as you do not want to be having to constantly charge your laptop during lectures or while trying to do your work. Try and look for a laptop with a battery life of 6 hours or more.
Finally the price of the laptop is a really big factor to consider being a college student and all. I think that a budget between €350-400 is more than enough to get a laptop with all the aspects I have mentioned above.