The "Back to School" season is a time when everybody can start anew, define priorities, be more disciplined about past endeavours, or start being engaged about something. While many may dread the back to school specials found at most retailers, other look at the opportunity to get a new computer.
For most, any dual core machine with 2 to 4GB of RAM will be sufficient to surf the Internet, use a word processor ( Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer ) and a spreadsheet like Excel or Calc.
The projects and demands of the past decade are more complex than those from the later part of the 20th century. If you are working in a specialized discipline such as musical composition or graphic design, it would be well worthwhile to look into the business class machines with dedicated GPUs (for graphics) from HP, Dell or Lenovo. Workstations have longer lives and will be suited to any task. If you are going to be typing, I strongly recommend getting a ThinkPad. The T and W series keyboards are second to none. I also really appreciate the the fact that there are fan control tools available.
If gaming, workstations are going to be fine, but the reader should be doubtful of the premise of this paragraph: we are talking about "Back to School" laptops. Nevertheless, I recommend a system with a ATI/AMD Radeon GPU. Unfortunately, the Nvidia hardware and drivers have given me a lot of problems, including severe tearing in video and 3D processing, like playing a game, watching a video on YouTube or in a video player from a local file. This problem has been common on desktops as well as laptops Nvidia GPUs.
I do not agree with the whole of this article, however the point about storage no longer being a concern is quite accurate. I fare quite well with at 64GB SSD. The reason I upgraded to an SSD was not so much for speed, but the absence of noise.
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