So what is best for University - A laptop or a desktop?

You may be asking yourself this question if you are thinking of buying a new system for university. Many people do this as they want a reliable system to work on, with minimal risk of their computer crashing or breaking. I mean, the last thing you want is to lose all of your work the night before a deadline.

However…which should you go for - should you take a laptop, or should you take a desktop? Firstly…there is one key question you want to ask: What are you going to use it for?

If all you want to do is to be able to do your work, chat on msn, download music etc. Then a laptop will suit you absolutely fine. However, if you are a big gamer and want to play games regularly at a decent frame rate - then perhaps a desktop will be best for you.

One thing to think about if you do take a laptop is your insurance. When you take out contents insurance - this usually covers your room as basic and nothing more. This means if your laptop is stolen outside of your bedroom, or where ever you may take it - you aren’t covered. Fear not though as when you buy your contents insurance there are addons which you can purchase, such as insurance for taking your laptop outside of your room. For insurance, I would definitely recommend Endsleigh insurance. They offer a wide range, including car insurance and travel insurance. But best of all, they do great Student contents cover - and are probably the most widely used insurer amongst students.

One other thing to think about, is when you are staying at university - how are you going to connect to the network? Now…a lot of halls have wired connections which is fine. But if you are living in a house, then you will likely have wireless internet through a router. The main reason for this is so you don’t have wires all over your property. Remember, 99% of new laptops will have built in wireless which is perfect for this. Also, they have wired connections so you can also use them on a wired network. Desktops on the other hand rarely come with wireless access out of the box. So if you wanted wireless, this is something which you would have to do yourself.

Not only this but laptops are obviously a lot more portable. My student house was quite noisy with the others, which was fine most of the time but when I wanted to concentrate on work I sometimes struggled. The best way I found to get around this was to go and work on campus for a bit in the library. The library and many other buildings at my university (Bournemouth) have wireless access which you can connect to for free. This meant I’d just take my laptop to university with me and work off it. The university does have a large amount of computers, but these can often get quite busy during the day. If you have your own laptop with you, you don’t have to worry whether or not you will be able to use a computer.

Portability is the best thing about a laptop, and allows you to remain social. I’ll give you an example; you want to have a chat with a few mates on msn, but you also want to stay in the livingroom to chat with your housemates and watch TV. Now, with a desktop this wouldn’t be possible - you’d have to go to your bedroom. However, the laptop meant we could all chill out in the livingroom. This works great for gaming, such as football manager which we often did on network play - we could all gather in the living room, or I could go round a mates house with my laptop and play with them on it. With a desktop this would not have been possible.

So, in my opinion - what should you get? If I was you - I’d take a laptop to university if you have the choice. If you have a desktop which is perfectly fine, then this isn’t a cry for you to quickly go out and replace it with a laptop as a desktop will be perfectly suitable - laptops in my opinion are just a little nicer in terms of their portability.

So, if you have the choice - go for a laptop

If you enjoyed this article, I’ve written up a few other ones which might be handy, click here to see them all .