Photo Courtesy: www.amazon.com Where does the laptop rank for IT students? Laptop ranks with food, shelter and clothes these days, not only for IT students but also for the common people, who watch movies, play games and do all sorts of activities during the irksome loadshedding hours. Markets are filled with all sorts of laptops, for all sorts of people of all age group. I bought a new laptop earlier this week. Also, I got an opportunity to research on the market. Basically, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Sony were the major laptop selling companies in our country and I wanted to buy a good, strong and durable laptop which would last at least for 4 years of my college life. I started with the recommendation of the seller at Sonu Electronics, Tamrakar House, Shop number 8, New Road, Kathmandu. He showed me a Dell Inspiron series in the beginning. He claimed the series to be the most sold series in our country. He started asking me about the system requirements I wanted in my laptop. Looking at my age, he was also concerned if I was a gamer. But the first thing that came to my mind was battery backup. I wanted a laptop which would last for hours during the loadshedding hours for programming, writing a news article, on the weekends obviously and for the time when you run out of patience when only an hour is left for the electricity to rejoin the homes of people, the pain suffered by every Nepalese student, specifically, every student of DWIT. The pain was there for the past 4 months because my previous laptop (HP pavilion notebook dv3) wouldn’t last for even half an hour. Hence, battery backup was the first thing on my mind. Seller then told me not to worry about the battery backup because almost all the laptops work for hours for the work I was willing to do. During loadshedding hours, he further recommended me to use the power saver option available on every laptop which dims the brightness of laptop and charge lasts longer. As a person who last visited the market to buy laptop 5 years back and knowing battery backup wasn’t a problem anymore, I thought to myself, “Ok, that’s advancement of technology!” However, he told me the best laptop in terms of battery backup was HP ProBook series. The laptop lasts for 5 hours even when multimedia features in the laptop are used. HP ProBook was a good strong laptop, really attractive but a bit heavy. For 4 GB RAM and 500 G.B. hard disk and laptop, which didn’t have genuine windows 8, it was way expensive. The initial price of the laptop was Rs. 77,000 but he was willing to sell the laptop around 75 thousand. I called my mom to inform her about the prices of the laptop being a bit higher than what I had expected. But she ensured me not to compromise on buying a nice laptop for my college life (license to buy expensive laptop :P). Gradually, we, the seller and I, started getting more involved in the conversation. I asked him, “Is that all you have got?” Now I opted for a laptop with RAM more than 4 G.B. and hard disk more than 500 G.B. My eyes went straight to an attractive black laptop with shiny body. It looked fancy and made of clay. It was HP 15 series. I approached for the laptop. As I was not concerned with the price anymore, I started with the system requirements. It had 6 G.B. RAM, 750 G.B. hard disk, genuine windows, 1792 M.B. internal graphics card. It seemed like a laptop with both beauty and brain. It had 15 inch screen and was lighter compared to the previous laptop. I was further surprised when I came to know about the price. It was Rs. 67,000. I thought, “This is the one.” Thankfully, the seller was one of my maternal uncle’s close friend. The final offer was Rs 64,000(family discount) with a free laptop bag, headphones and MacAfee Internet Security worth 15 months of trial. I bargained for a 16 G.B. pen drive too and pendrive didn’t hold me back from buying the laptop. Neither did I have second thoughts on the laptop nor I looked for any other laptops and he too happily accepted the offer. He did all the paperwork for insurance and warranty. Long story short, I bought a HP 15 series which was almost perfect for my choice. After almost a week’s use, my love for the laptop hasn’t changed a bit. It is way faster than my previous laptop. Charge lasts infinitely when videos are not watched. I have installed FIFA 14. I enjoy occasional gaming and the graphics is spot on. The hard disk space is sufficient for me by all means. The only minor problem is that it cannot carry out multitasking when a file is being copied into the computer. With 15 months of anti-virus security, my computer is virus free and fully functioning. What else would I want from a laptop? We are destined to be together for my entire college life. HP 15 series is a middle ground between a really expensive laptop and a cheap working laptop. So, this laptop is highly recommended if you want to buy a nice, durable laptop for a reasonable rate. Happy computing I guess! : D