The most important aspect of buying a laptop are your personal preferences and the price.

If you have a lot of money and you are enrolled in the gaming stream you may want to purchase an Alienware laptop (now owned by DELL). The Alienware laptops have top of the line components and they are PC-based.

Mac laptops are very popular as well and for good reason. Mac's are easy to use, known to be very stable, less susceptible to viruses and they look great.

Students that have a tighter budget may want to shop for HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, or Sony laptops.

The two most common processors found in laptops are Intel based or AMD based. Both processors have their strengths and weaknesses but overall they are comparable. AMD purchased graphics company ATI and therefore has good video-card support. A better video-card means greater power requirements which affects battery life. Do you want better video performance or is battery life more important to you? AMD and Intel are very competitive - you can't go wrong choosing either processor.

When your looking to buy a new laptop size matters. The laptop size is defined by the display size and its width. Gaming students may prefer a laptop with a larger screen size, perhaps 16” or larger.

Since laptops are meant to be portable check their weight too. Ultra portable laptop's have a small screen size 14 inches or less and are light and compact.

The performance of your laptop depends on the following factors:

• CPU - Dual and Quad core processors are nice because they combines two and four independent cores respectively on a single package/die
• RAM - the more the better! 2GB or more is adequate.
• Hard Disk - size 160 GB or more
• Battery Life

Make sure to get:

• integrated web-cam
• wireless networking
• DVD writer
• carry-case

Don't spend any money on the operating system, the MSDNAA allows Computer Science students to download Microsoft Software free of charge. This can save you a considerable amount of money!