By: James Arikpo
As a student in this generation, it is one of the most profitable things to own a system or a laptop as it’s popularly called. The emerging world is one in which almost everything is centered on the cyber space; information, documentation, design, modelling and so forth. With good system exposure, you will be able to develop in areas like content creation, AI, UX and UI design, programming, and also secure internship sessions that will increase your productivity and employability when you eventually graduate.
According to statista.com, towards the end of 2021, the unemployment rate was at 33%, with universities spilling out thousands of fresh graduates every year, therefore, building digital skill that pertains to your field of interest as an undergraduate becomes an edge besides bagging a first class degree. Moreover, if you are a goal achiever and you intend to be at the peak of your career in the next 15 years, you shouldn’t wait for the Nigerian government and her school system to preside over your future. There is higher possibility that they will keep playing football with it, leaving you on the screen to watch the score line. Why not use the opportunity to horn those digital skills that can fetch you pay beyond the walls of the country? I mean, something that isn’t fraudulent.
At this point, has it occurred to you that in building these skills, you will require a personal laptop? And of course, you might find it tasking settling with one. In a perfect world, I’ll advise you go for Apple product, but unfair is the world we live in, hence, HP, Dell, Acer will do pretty well. This brings us to six basic features to watch out for in order to get a good system that will befit your budget:
WHAT ARE THESE FEATURES?
CPU: The processor plays a very important role in any system, as it is the mother board. If you are to run many tasks at a given time which goes beyond the ability of the processor, the system starts hanging and processing information slowly. Intel’s core-based processors are one of the best CPUs. There is corei3, corei5 and corei7; they are good in multitasking and increases in performance as it moves to corei7. Then i9 core processor is even more powerful.
RAM: Just like in Androids, the higher the RAM, the faster the system. 8GB RAM has a good enough speed already for normal tasks, although there is 4GB and 16GB and so on. Usually, the RAM capacity can be upgraded in a system, i.e. one could upgrade a system of 4GB to 8GB RAM.
KEYBOARD QUALITY: Go for a system that has a comfortable layout, i.e. one that has good spacing of its keys. This is especially required in cases where you intend to type volume of work with it.
SCREEN: It is advisable to go for a portable system with a wide screen ratio. This is because to carry out great tasks, you end up staring at your laptop for hours.
STORAGE: Check the storage capacity. A hard disk drive, HDD of capacity 512GB is good enough to serve a student for almost any purpose, however, it produces a lot of noise and heat. On the other hand, the Solid State Drive, SSD offers a lot of speed and runs silently. So, by comparison, a system with a good SSD is recommendable.
BATTERY LIFE: As much as every other thing on the list, the battery life of the system is important too. Usually the manufacturing company rate their battery beyond the capacity they can practically offer, this is so because the brightness level, number of apps opened at a given time affects the performance of the battery. It becomes necessary to get a third party recommendation based on battery.
