Besides books and coaching classes, the laptop has become an essential tool for college students. If you are a class 12 student who has opted for higher studies and are now convincing your parents to buy a nice laptop, you might have landed at the right article. There are many laptops available online with different features and specifications. Some laptops are even priced as low as Rs. 10,000, which you might consider, just because they are cheap. If you aren’t fully aware, you could end up with a laptop that may not be ideal for running software that’s in your syllabus.
In this article, we attempt to make you an expert buyer and find the right laptop for the course you’ve just applied for. Keeping in mind that your parents will most likely buy the laptop for you, we have mentioned below, both budget and performance laptop specification recommendations that might help in choosing the right model.
Laptops for Arts, Humanities and Social Science streams
According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2017-18, of 36.6 million enrolments, 36.4 per cent students opted for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences courses. Students selecting humanities and social science courses would spend most of their time on their laptop, downloading study material, researching, reading documents, using MS Excel and Word, sending emails and watching movies.
For Art streams, students opting for Fashion and Mass Media courses will need to run some professional photo and video editing software on their laptops. They include Photoshop, GIMP, Adobe Premier Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, etc. These software are graphics demanding and are also heavy to load.
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Laptops for Science, Engineering and Technology streams
The Science stream has several diploma and degree courses under it. According to the AISHE survey report, around 17.1 per cent students enrolled for this stream in 2017 – 18. Students opting for science courses will need a laptop for writing documents for college projects, downloading study material and sending across emails. Some may even use Microsoft Excel to list down physics formulas and laboratory readings for chemistry projects. Most of these tasks can be easily handled by laptops equipped with decent specs.
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Nearly 14.1 per cent students enrol for computer science, technology and engineering every year. If you are planning to get into one of these fields, you will run lots of software on the laptop. For example, both IT and Computer Science courses require students to work on Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as Eclipse, NetBeans, Atom, Microsoft Visual Code, etc. These are platforms are helpful in programming for languages such as Java, C++, Python, Perl, HTML among many others.
Computer Science and Technology course also includes some introductory lessons on the Linux operating system. To get it running, you will need to install VirtualBox on your laptop, which may run on Windows but also let you load Linux at a time, without ever having to reboot. Laptops with basic specs may struggle and that’s the reason you should consider spending a bit more and buying a mid-range specs laptop.
Those into the engineering stream may use designing software such as AutoCAD, SketchUp and the popular MATLAB package. To run these intensive software, you might need a laptop featuring mid-to-high-end processor along with a graphics card. We also suggest looking at large 15.6-inch full HD (1920 x 1080) screens, which are great for coding and designing most of the time. Large screen and high-resolution screen offer comfortable workspace and allows for more content to be displayed on the screen.
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Laptops for Commerce streams
Around 14.1 per cent students select Commerce as their career stream. Commerce has three widely selected course options – Business studies, Accounts and Economics. If you are opting for these courses, the curriculum may require software such as Tally ERP, SAP and EasyAuto 4. In addition, there are some widely used MIS tools such as EasyReports BI and Power BI used for automating and generating data reports, creating data dashboards, calculations, etc.
As a Commerce student, you will also use Excel spreadsheets to calculate and store information. If you have to load huge data and multiple spreadsheets, a laptop with basic specifications may slow down.
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We’ve just recommended laptop specifications for budget and performance users. If you are opting for a career stream that isn’t mentioned here, you can still deliberate on your requirements and make tweaks to the laptop specifications we’ve recommended. Also, now is a good time to check out the offers on laptops on reliancedigital.in. You can now choose and buy one online, have it home delivered, or you can head over to your nearest Reliance Digital store for a hands-on demo of the products.
