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Student’s Guide to Buying a Laptop in Europe

2020-02-02
by Olivier Cleynen

By Olivi­er Cley­nen and Samuel Voß

You are a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent in Europe, you have very lit­tle mon­ey, and are unsure whether you should buy a lap­top, and which one: we wrote this guide for you. Our stu­dents are engi­neer­ing stu­dents in Ger­many, so this guide is geared towards them, but most of the infor­ma­tion here should also apply to oth­er dis­ci­plines and countries.

You Need A Laptop

You want a machine where you can write text and cal­cu­late things com­fort­ably and flu­ent­ly. Few tablets pro­vide this, and smart­phones aren’t adequate.

You also want to be good at using com­put­ers. Lap­tops may be the pre­vi­ous generation’s thing, and you may have a can-do-it-all smart­phone or tablet, but it is the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion which dri­ves the econ­o­my now. In pret­ty much any sec­tor of the job mar­ket, when you start work­ing, the bulk of the work will be done on desk­tops and lap­tops. A lot of know-how will be use­ful then: good man­age­ment of files/folders, shar­ing doc­u­ments online, trou­bleshoot­ing, archiv­ing, script­ing, visu­al­iz­ing infor­ma­tion, back­ups, using pass­word man­agers, ad block­ers, and more. Those skills come with prac­tice; you can get start­ed now. Get a laptop!

Not All Laptops Are Good

First off, do not buy a lap­top from a super­mar­ket. Super­stores, whether they are spe­cial­ized in elec­tron­ics or not, sell lap­tops for the largest con­sumer mar­ket. Those machines are designed to be used three hours per week. They have beau­ti­ful screens that will best ren­der DVD and Net­flix movies. They have frag­ile bod­ies, poor cool­ing, low repairabil­i­ty, and ter­ri­ble bat­tery life.

Instead of those, you want a lap­top that is stur­dy enough to last your whole stud­ies. Your best bet is a sec­ond-hand busi­ness-class lap­top.
In large com­pa­nies, lap­tops are crit­i­cal equip­ment (how would you like your lead engi­neer strand­ed because her pow­er sup­ply con­nec­tor broke as she attends your best cus­tomer?). The cur­rent prac­tice for large com­pa­nies is to lease entire fleets of new lap­tops on two- to three-year con­tracts. When those lap­tops are returned to the lessor, they are wiped clean and hit the sec­ond-hand mar­ket. At that point, they are the best val­ue for your money. 

Important Characteristics

Pow­er and stor­age space do not mat­ter. None of the tasks you will be work­ing on a stu­dent should require seri­ous com­put­ing pow­er. If you need to car­ry out inten­sive com­pu­ta­tions as part of your stud­ies or of a stu­dent assis­tant job, ask for access to a desk­top belong­ing to the university.

The crit­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of a use­ful stu­dent lap­top are:

  • small enough that you can car­ry it painlessly;
  • sol­id con­struc­tion, in par­tic­u­lar screen hinges and pow­er supply;
  • decent bat­tery life so you can use it half a day with­out plug­ging it in;
  • good cool­ing so it remains qui­et and dust-free;
  • up-to-date oper­at­ing sys­tem and soft­ware so you stay clear of soft­ware vulnerabilities;
  • a mat­te screen, for eye com­fort and for work­ing outside.

A few fam­i­lies of com­put­ers, pro­duced by large man­u­fac­tur­ers and aimed at enter­prise fleets, meet those hard­ware cri­te­ria. They are usu­al­ly bulki­er and less ele­gant than their con­sumer mar­ket coun­ter­parts. They are designed to be switched on twelve hours per day. When new, they cost over a thou­sand euros, and then their val­ue decreas­es very quick­ly on the sec­ond-hand market.

Prob­a­bly the largest fam­i­lies, as of 2019–2020, are:

  • Dell Lat­ti­tude
  • Leno­vo ThinkPad (espe­cial­ly the X and T lines)
  • HP Elite­book

12-inch screen lap­tops are small enough to work on an air­plane or in a tight lec­ture hall. 13- to 14-inch lap­tops are a good com­pro­mise between porta­bil­i­ty and screen size. 15-inch lap­tops are more com­fort­ably used on a desk, and the largest size you should consider.

Where and How to Buy

Choose a mod­el that suits you, and search for it on Ebay. Two items on your check­list should be:
1) It is sold by a pro­fes­sion­al ven­dor. Look for ven­dors who have five or more of the mod­el, on sale for imme­di­ate pur­chase at fixed prices. Avoid pri­vate auc­tions, with which you will receive no war­ran­ty, and no abil­i­ty to return the machine if some­thing isn’t right.
2) The lap­top is wiped clean. It must come with a valid (legal) license for the soft­ware installed on it. You do not want to inher­it some­body else’s soft­ware prob­lems or an expired Win­dows license. If you want a Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, make sure you use a Win­dows ver­sion that will be sup­port­ed for the years to come (As of Decem­ber 2019, this means you should require Win­dows 10). Do not car­ry your work around cam­pus on a machine with unpatched crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.
If you intend to use Lin­ux, you can wipe the lap­top dur­ing instal­la­tion, and the above should not be a con­cern. Lin­ux usu­al­ly runs very well on busi­ness laptops.

On busi­ness lap­tops, hard­ware upgrades are usu­al­ly very easy to perform.

  • RAM: often­times there are free slots where you can add RAM mem­o­ry chips. 
  • SSD: you may swap the old hard dri­ve with an SSD dri­ve (SSD dri­ves are silent and much faster than the old HDD dri­ves with rotat­ing mag­net­ic disks). Pick a big brand SSD for high­er reliability.
  • Bat­tery: the old­er the lap­top, the more like­ly it is that you will need to replace the bat­tery with a new one; depend­ing on the mod­el, this should cost 20–80 EUR.
  • Cos­met­ics: If you picked a “B” or “2. Wahl” item with clear signs of use on Ebay, the lid may be scratched. You may cov­er it up with an adhe­sive film (the kind used to cus­tomize cars these days) for just a few euros.

A few examples, relevant as of December 2019:

(here, Ger­man Ebay links: you should cor­re­spond­ing­ly check your country’s most pop­u­lar auc­tion site)

Aside from Ebay, you can find some ded­i­cat­ed shops for used lap­tops such as Lap­store. Some busi­ness lap­top man­u­fac­tur­ers also offer stu­dent dis­counts on their new laptops.

Conclusion

With a lit­tle care and plan­ning, and a mod­er­ate bud­get, you can get a machine that you can count upon for the next three years. It will help you get your degree bet­ter than a shiny super­mar­ket lap­top, and just as well as a 2000 EUR Mac­Book Pro. Good luck!

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(more by Olivier: articles, thermodynamique, fluid mechanics, mécanique newtonienne)