Back to school, is there a perfect solution to avoid being caught unprepared? There is no unicum, because one thing is to study architecture and need the autocad, another is to be able to be satisfied (as in middle school) with a machine with a decidedly less important technical equipment. For those who do not have an unlimited spending budget, the options are not lacking but it is necessary to orientate oneself in a targeted way between the technical characteristics of the device, from the battery life to the presence of a webcam with good resolution, from the versatility of use to the necessary performance / features to listen to music, stream movies or play video games. The choice between desktop or laptop, unless there are particular needs in the graphic and video field, sees the second option prevail, precisely because of the greater portability of the notebook between one room and another or from school to home. The fixed PC, in turn, remains a valid option in cases where there is a need for large screens and greater capacities to manage the lessons in streaming (in this case, choosing the webcam to be placed on top of the monitor independently).
Speaking of notebooks, it is good to find the right compromise between processing power and costs in terms of hardware equipment: in general you need at least 8 Gbytes of Ram memory and a new generation processor (the Intel core i5 or i7 or the Amd Ryzen 3 or 5, for example) to ensure the right speed, an SSD storage unit (solid state disks) of at least 256 Gbyte, a battery with an autonomy of 5/6 hours. As for the screen, going under 14 inches could be counterproductive for those who have to spend several hours at the PC every day. Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 hybrids with displays from 11 to 13.3 inches are very light, beautiful to look at and definitely more versatile, but they cost much more (well over a thousand euros for the top models) than the 400/500 euros needed for a 15-inch mid-range laptop. A viable and “low cost” way is that of Chromebooks, efficient and easy-to-use computers by installing on-board software and applications from Google. Another option available to spend little is to rely on refurbished PCs: they allow you to save from 20% to 60% on the original price and usually guarantee adequate performance on the restored components (battery, internal memory, power supply and ports).
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A device that is often not lacking in the student’s tech baggage is the tablet. The basic recommendation for the purchase is to look for a product that is first of all performing, and therefore able to guarantee a good fluidity in all contexts, from the reproduction of multimedia content to online browsing. Focusing on iPads (the Pro model is perfect for taking notes, processing images and managing even large Excel sheets) is not wrong, while for Android tablets (Huawei’s Mediapad T5, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S6 Lite and Tab A7 and Lenovo’s Tab P11 are just some of the possible examples) you need to be a little more careful to find the product with good battery life and secondary features like stylus input. Those who attend a high school, and in particular a technical-computer course where the computer is an integral part of many lessons, the ideal would be to combine a medium-high-end laptop with the desktop computer at home, for which they spend from 800 euros in on. For university students, who often study away from home, off-site or in a classroom on a campus, the watchword is finally lightness and power. No fixed PCs, therefore, but laptops capable of combining usability and performance, peculiarities of evergreen such as the MacBook Air or of illustrious challengers such as Microsoft’s Surface Laptop line, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 or Galaxy Book Pro 360, yet another example of how the concept of ecosystem (with the Second Screen function it is possible to expand the desktop screen by connecting to a Galaxy tablet) is becoming more and more familiar even in personal computers.
