Do You Need a New Laptop to Get the Most Out of Your Online Courses?

Gaming Laptop

The modern student is not limited by age or even geographical boundaries, because online education has become significantly more accessible after the pandemic. It should be noted that the infrastructure was already there within the professional education sector, but recent events have turned the online medium into a global standard across all stages of education.

If you have plans to further enhance your professional knowledge, skills, and resume, there has never been a better time to consider online education for working students. However, does that mean you need a new laptop to join an online course? If so, which ones should you be looking at? Let’s answer those questions and others like them next.

Do I Need a New Laptop to Study Online?

This is not an easy question to answer without knowing anything about:

  1. Thelaptop,the OEM, the software applications needed, and the present state in which the laptop is in
  2. The type of online course or program which you are looking to join

For the sake of providing better guidance, let’s separate the answer into two broad categories of:

  1. Courses that do not require a powerful, new laptop to join and complete
  2. Courses that do require your laptop to have some serious processing and rendering power inside, irrespective of whether it’s brand new or not

When You Don’t Need to Invest in a Powerful Laptop

If your laptop is less than two years old and you have no complaints about its current performance, you won’t need to buy a new one to get an online degree which does not involve IT. Examples include most non-technological courses such as a business administration/management degree, a law degree, an advanced nursing degree, a criminology degree, a degree in any of the liberal arts degree or a social work degree to name just a few.

Instead, you should be investing your time and money in something that’s more relevant to your field of choice. For example, if you are interested in joining a criminology degree course at the prestigious Wilfrid Laurier University, you can benefit a lot more by augmenting your criminology degree with a short online course in emergency management. This should make your resume stronger as you approach a career in public safety, investigative policing, and forensics.

Even if the laptop is a bit on the older side, you should still be able to skip getting an upgrade for a few more years at least. This is provided that the regular performance you are getting from the device is not anything that affects your work/study experience too much. As long as we are discussing a laptop which will be used primarily for attending classes and meetings, reading, researching, browsing, using office apps, etc. students may not need the latest hardware in their laptops to study online. As a general rule, you may want to keep the number of apps, as well as the amount of data on your old PC’s or MacBook’s internal HDD to a minimum. These little steps often boost performance in older laptops quite significantly.

When You Do Need a Powerful Laptop to Study Online

There are several avenues of education which makes it necessary for students to have access to a computer that’s powerful enough for handling CPU and GPU intensive workloads. The CPU in particular will need to be more powerful than the ones we usually find even in low-end gaming laptops. To successfully learn and complete advanced courses in multimedia, animation, film making (rendering takes a huge toll on the CPU), video editing, photo editing, digital art, graphics designing and game development among others, you will need a laptop with some serious internal power.

Keep in mind that your present laptop may very well be up to the task, especially if you are an avid gamer. High-end gaming laptops from even three/four generations ago are often found to be more than sufficient for completing resource-intensive online coursework. So, it’s not as much about buying a new laptop, as it is about having access to one that can handle your coursework. In case your old laptop feels significantly slower than it used to be, make sure that all applications on it, as well as the OS has been updated with the latest firmware versions. Backup your data and do a complete factory data reset (format) if nothing else works.

Which are the Best Laptops for Working Students in 2022?

By now, you should have a proper idea regarding whether you really need a new laptop to complete the specific online course that is relevant to you. If the answer is still yes, then we have a choice list of the best new laptops for working students to consider in 2022.

MacBook Air M1: Powered by the Apple M1 Chip and Apple’s latest Monterey OS, the MacBook Air M1 is arguably the best laptop for students and office workers alike. It looks and feels as sleek as ever, with enough power within Apple’s new chip to work through moderate video editing and rendering work without a hitch.

Microsoft Surface Pro 8: This is a 13-inch, Windows 11 tablet, and laptop that comes from Microsoft with a decent Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor, an Intel Iris XEGPU, and a stunning 2880 x 1920, 120Hz, IPS display. The Surface Pro 8is certainly expensive, but it is pretty much the best Windows 2-in-1 laptop that you can buy right now.

MSI GF65: Finally, we have the slimmest gaming laptop from MSI with an Intel Core i7-10750H, a dedicated RTX 3060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, a 15.3-inch, and a 144Hz, FHD display under CA$1,500. Rest assured that it will be capable of handling all your online coursework, video rendering needs, and the latest games with equal ease.

Don’t buy the MSI GF66 Katana which is priced significantly higher just because it sports the Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPU. This is a downgrade because the older, Comet Lake 10th gen CPU inside the GF65 is actually more powerful. Also, the older laptop sports an RTX 3060, which is more powerful than the 3050 Tiinside the more expensive MSI GF66 by leaps and bounds.

If you are waiting for more big releases this year, then you may have to wait a lot longer. 2022 is going to be the year when the tech supply chain problems will be dealt with increasing efficiency, and mass production should be able to meet demands a lot better by the end of Q3. Therefore, this year will be all about meeting demands, rather than releasing new products.

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