by Mishra Planeswalker

Created on: December 20, 2008

About a year ago, I began trawling the computer market for a laptop for my first year of high school. In fact, the laptop I chose is the one that I am typing this article on right now. The key fact you must remember is that every high school student is different, and there is no one universal computing solution. If the student in question is more geared to academia, they will require a different computer than a student who simply wishes to play games in their down-time. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that the student has a primary focus on their academics, as a student should.

There are a number of factors one must consider when purchasing a laptop for a high school student. Again, this article is intended as a general guide, and only the student will know what they need to enhance their high school experience.

1 - Speed
When a student is in class, it is unreasonable to ask the entire class to wait for you to start up your computer and run an application so that you can take notes. You must have a computer that has a short boot time, so as to reduce the amount of information that is not quickly typed into a file. There are two main ways to make sure that your machine will be as fast as it can be, and these are both well worth investing in to make sure that your computer runs smoothly and efficiently.

The first upgrade you may consider is the processing speed. The higher the processing speed, the faster your computer will do all the calculations it needs to perform at optimum capacity. This is what allows your computer to boot quickly, as well as launch applications in record time. One of the best processors on the market is the Intel Core 2 Duo, which at appropriate speeds (preferably in excess of 2 GigaHertz) can make your computer save precious time that would otherwise be wasted waiting for your computer to load various applications.

The second option for speeding up your high school student's laptop is to increase the amount of RAM (random access memory). A good analogy is if you imagine a conveyor belt, which carries data along it. The speed of the belt is the speed of the processor, and the width of the belt is the amount of memory your computer has. Having more RAM in the computer allows for multiple processes or applications to be run simultaneously. Oftentimes, a student may be on the internet, in a word processor, and perhaps listening to some music, all at the same time. Using a small amount of RAM, these three tasks could cause a computer

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