In this page, I will cover everything you need to know about getting a laptop for law school: essential parts of a laptop you should focus on, what is not so important and what are my top 5 picks ($170 to $2100) for any law school student.
What are the requirements for law school laptop?
I have isolated 3 major requirements that would make any laptop a solid choice. Then I have 5 minor requirements that would make sure the notebook we are getting is well-suited for law school and student life in general.
What is essential for the best laptop for law school?
Major requirement Storage
I think, SSD is my most used abbreviation. And for a good reason. Even now I get a bit excited when seeing how quickly every app starts up and how little time I need to find a missing document. SSD is the cure from my trauma of slow computers and hard drives breaking down since Windows 98 era.
If you have been living under HDD rock and you do not know what an SSD is – I can break it down to a few very basic rules of thumb. SSD is a different type of a storage drive that offers a tremendous improvement in overall speed and general experience when using a computer. In the past ~5 years, these drives have become a lot cheaper and viable option compared to their older HDD counterparts. And now, these SSD drives are becoming the standard. Yet, there still are many notebooks in every price range that do not have an SSD. In short, getting an SSD over HDD is be the investment to a computer’s performance you could make.
To understand what you should expect from a laptop, here’s my guideline after comparing ~130 laptops on the market:
- Under $700: regular hard drive
- $700 to $1000: small SSD storage (250 GB)
- $1000 and up: medium SSD storage (500 GB) with possible additional 1 TB HDD
Depending on a laptop’s size, there are various options to upgrade a laptop in the future, so do not worry too much to get this requirement one a bit wrong. Unlike processors or graphics chips, storage drives are easy to replace or upgrade, especially in large 15-to-17-inch computers. With smaller ones, I would be more cautious and I would try to get my preferred setup already built-in.