Gifts for High School Grads: A Laptop

With Spring officially here, it's only a matter of weeks before graduations begin to pile up on your schedule. If there happens to be a high school graduation on that schedule then you're going to need to get a good gift for the college hopeful. While clothes and things of that nature are all thoughtful, nothing beats a good Laptop for a future college student. Not every college arms their freshmen with free computers which is a must-have for a student. They'll be able to take care of their work wherever they are and do all of the web browsing instant messaging essentials while they're getting accustomed to the college grind.

Picking out the right laptop can be a daunting task for someone who isn't computer savvy. There's a truckload of components to worry about, especially if you're looking for one that isn't going to be outdated within a month or by the year is done. You'll have to think about the processor, wireless capability, hard drive space, ram, operating system and a bevy of other things that go into a good laptop. Luckily enough, most manufacturers have laptops that adhere to the needs of virtually any consumer.

The most important thing to realize is that laptops have become quite powerful in the past few years and in many cases are replacing the big bulky desktop. The average student doesn't need one of these extremely powerful laptops as they're big, on the heavy side, and generally cost upwards of $2,000, which is enough to break just about any wallet you can think of. While browsing through the myriad of set ups that manufacturers such as Apple or Dell have laid out, keep a few things in mind before you pick anything out.

You're going to need a healthy chunk of RAM. If you're going with a laptop that's going to be running Windows, RAM has become incredibly important. Due to the fact that Vista is graphic intensive and students generally do plenty of things at once on the computer (Instant messaging, research, music, etc) they're going to want to know what the laptop isn't going to crap out on them randomly. The standard now is 1 gigabyte of memory, but 2 gigabytes is much more reliable and should be sought after.