The Best Laptops for College Students in 2025

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College life is demanding enough! Your laptop must keep up with you from the classroom to the dorm room. Let us help you find that just-right machine: Since PCMag's founding decades ago, we've tested thousands of laptops under PC Labs' strict methodology, always supplemented with incisive comparisons to other models on the market. Today, our team of experts reviews more than 100 models yearly to find the best laptops for college and university students. Our current top pick for most college students is the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch (UM3406) for its value-packed price, speedy performance, and gorgeous touch screen, but we have additional picks for specific scenarios and bigger or smaller budgets. Check out our complete list of the best college laptops for 2025, followed by our expert buying advice to find the best college laptop. We're confident one of them fits your price range, academic needs, and personal style.

How do you narrow down the list above, let alone other systems not mentioned here, to find the right one to be your college colleague? Some questions will apply to all college laptop shoppers, whether families with kids or corporate executives; others are specific to higher education. Let's run down what you need to know.

Do College Students Get Laptop Discounts? First, Check With the School

The first and most important thing to do is check with your school for specific system requirements and negotiated discounts. They may have hard-and-fast hardware recommendations available at special prices from vendors—or not.

Some colleges and universities want their students equipped with Windows-based laptops to reduce software incompatibility issues or to concentrate tech support on one platform. Others don't care which operating system you use, whether Windows, macOS, or even Linux if you're a hard-core type. Some institutions have on-site repair centers that service only laptops purchased from the university or an affiliated computer store on campus. Using one of these facilities, the turnaround time will be much quicker than sending a laptop back to the original manufacturer.

Most schools do offer price breaks for particular vendors and provide extensive software bundles, which can shave off a good amount from your college laptop purchase. So you might want to look into the campus store as a first shopping destination before you hit your local superstore or favorite online seller.

How Heavy Should a College Laptop Be?

Not every student will agree, but depending on how far you haul it every day, a big-screen notebook may not be such a good idea.

Sure, it's nice to have a mini home theater in your dorm room or play the latest games in big-screen glory, but a five-pound-plus laptop with a 15-to-18-inch screen will be a chore to haul across campus when you're running from class to class. You're better off with something lighter, so if screen size matters less to you than convenience, a super-thin ultraportable might be the way to go.

For most students, a 13- or 14-inch widescreen panel is ideal, as it will make room for other items in your backpack while minimizing the weight burden. Depending on your tolerance level, a smaller display works as long as you understand that full web pages and productivity applications will involve more scrolling, and fonts will appear smaller than they do on larger screens, assuming the same resolution and zoom level.

Essays, research papers, and chatting online with your classmates will take up most of your computing time, so a full-size keyboard and comfortable touchpad are crucial. Also know: When you venture smaller than a 13-inch-class laptop for college, you run the risk of a compromised typing experience. The easiest way to ensure that you have the best keyboard is to stop by a brick-and-mortar store and spend some time typing on prospective choices of different sizes.

If you do decide to buy a smaller, less expensive laptop for college, it's probably worth investing in a standalone keyboard you can keep in the dorm or at home for when you need to type a lot. A desktop monitor you attach via HDMI or USB-C could be a nice complement, too.

What Processor to Get in a College Laptop?

Laptops for college come with a wide selection of processors across both budgets and usage cases—you can choose one that maximizes performance or one that favors battery life. Or you can select one that plays to both strengths: Intel's Core CPUs confer power and battery efficiency benefits. AMD's Ryzen mobile chips are less common but have also emerged as viable picks for ultraportable laptops. But of late, more options have emerged from each of these chipmakers, plus a new face on the scene.

For Windows laptops, the new hotness is Intel's Core Ultra and Core Ultra 2, and AMD's Ryzen 8000-series and Ryzen AI 300, processors. All of these recent families of CPU come equipped with on-chip neural-engine silicon to run AI tasks locally. Qualcomm also re-entered the Windows laptop market—its biggest push ever—with efficient, performant Arm-based Snapdragon X processors, which are meant for the type of portable and lightweight laptops college students are looking for. All three of the chip lines emphasize low-power operation, and select models can deliver better battery life than previous-generation ones with earlier Core and Ryzen CPUs.

If you desire all-day battery life and spend almost all of your time in a web browser, though, you might want to consider going with a Chromebook. These typically run on low-powered Intel Core (no Ultra) or N-series processors that suffice for the kinds of workday online tasks at which Chromebooks excel. (More about Chromebooks in a bit below.)

Conversely, if performance ranks high on your list, a MacBook with Apple's "M" series chips (M4 is the latest generation) or a Windows laptop with at least an Intel Core Ultra 5 or an AMD Ryzen 5 8000 begin to give the oomph you'll need. AMD and Intel's 7-series processors handle even more demanding workloads, which some college courses may require more than others. (If you want to dig deeper, our guide to laptop processors gets into lots more detail on understanding CPUs for laptops. There's a lot to it.) For most college users, though, a mid-level processor from the last two generations should suffice for most tasks outside of engineering or computation-heavy curricula such as graphic design or video production.

If you like playing games in your downtime, you might want to splurge on a more expensive gaming laptop for college. Most general-purpose notebooks, especially at under-$800 prices, won't have the discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) necessary to make the hottest game titles look good and play smoothly. But if you hunt around a little, you can find gaming laptops these days starting at $700 to $900 with a decent Nvidia GeForce RTX or (much less common) AMD Radeon RX GPU for playing games at 1080p resolution and moderate or better image quality settings. (See our guide to the best cheap gaming laptops for lots more about budget GPUs, and about how to buy just enough of a gaming machine for your needs.) A powerful GPU can also help in certain high-end and scientific applications, but, like a high-powered processor, it's also a drain on battery life.

The good news is that in most other cases (unless, say, you're an architecture major with a heavy reliance on computer-aided design or CAD software), modern processors' integrated graphics silicon should suffice for the day-to-day tasks you'll face. Today, that usually means some form of Intel integrated graphics under the Intel Xe or Arc brands. Our reviews will detail their comparative performance levels, but none is a match for even a moderate dedicated GPU. (Read more about the limits of gaming on the integrated graphics processors in mainstream laptops.)

How Much Storage to Get in a Laptop for College?

With the increasing prevalence of cloud storage and web applications, having plentiful local storage space is somewhat less vital than it used to be, but you should still make sure that your laptop for college meets your needs. If you plan to install a lot of programs or want to hang on to lots of large media files, you'll need at least half a terabyte (512GB) or more. If you don't foresee needing all that local storage or are content with leaving a lot of your work online, you can get by with a laptop with a 256GB drive.

Whichever way you go, remember that storage affects speed, too. A few generations-old, remaindered budget laptops may use old-fashioned hard drives, which do provide more storage for less money but are noticeably slow compared with the snappy solid-state drives (SSDs) most common today. We strongly recommend SSDs for laptops that are carried around campus a lot since these drives (if not the laptops themselves) shrug off drop damage, and they deliver much peppier performance. Any reasonably modern laptop at this point will have an SSD.

The good news is that you can add more space whenever you need it by plugging an external hard drive or external SSD into one of your laptop's USB ports. Although you probably won't have to do this unless you're an aspiring videographer or filmmaker, it's a good option to have.

Gamers may want to take an altogether different view. With many AAA game installations topping 40GB or 50GB apiece, a small SSD fills up fast. You'll want to think about that before you buy a machine with, say, just a 256GB SSD, or at least be prepared to swap games on and off the drive as you complete them. You really need to insist on at least a 512GB drive in a gaming laptop, with 1TB much better.

What Kind of Battery Life to Expect From a College Laptop?

A sizable battery can be your biggest ally on a day filled with classes and extracurricular activities. A few college laptops come with multiple battery options at the time of purchase. Most, though, have only one—and it's not swappable or removable.

In this case, figure out where battery life ranks in the grand scheme of things. If removable batteries are an option (which is very rare nowadays), it might be a good idea to get a second one, or a larger "extended" one if available, at the time of purchase. The more cells a battery contains within a given model line, the longer its life, all else being equal.

A big battery means more heft, but the weight gain is well worth it if it means working longer without an AC outlet. This is where our reviews come in especially handy; we test every laptop that passes through our labs with a nonstop video rundown so you can get a good idea of relative endurance between models. Most of our picks last for more than 10 hours at minimum these days, while those with longer-lasting batteries ran for around 15 hours on our rundown test. Apple's MacBooks and laptops with Intel Core Ultra or Qualcomm Snapdragon processors frequently even achieve results of more than 20 hours.

An important caveat: Bear in mind that our video rundown is a best-case scenario test. Using the laptop for heavy multitasking off the battery with the screen brightness cranked up and Wi-Fi on will deliver lesser runtimes. Look at our battery rundown times as measures of relative potential, not absolutes.

Are Chromebooks Good for College?

In the past several years, we've seen a strong push by makers of Chromebooks—relatively low-cost laptops based on Google's ChromeOS—into the education market. Chromebooks are still mostly web-centric, likely to rely on the online instead of locally installed versions of Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, but have relatively full feature sets. If the school you're attending puts its coursework in the cloud, a Chromebook can offer you much of the functionality of a regular laptop and may deliver longer battery life.

It will also likely cost you much less than other notebooks. Prices for basic Chromebook models typically run between $200 and $400 (although higher-end models can go for $1,000 or more). Just be sure you have ready access to reliable, stable Wi-Fi, as these systems have scant local storage, and you must plan to use them effectively offline.

Serious PC gamers, of course, won't find much use for one of these laptops. Unless you are looking to stream games through a service like GeForce Now, they only run ChromeOS apps and Android apps from the Google Play store. But a Chromebook can also be a good, inexpensive second college laptop you carry around campus to take notes, while your beastly gaming rig (or desktop gaming PC, for that matter) hangs back at the dorm or at home. (In the market for a ChromeOS laptop? We've rounded up today's best Chromebooks.)

Are 2-in-1 Laptops Worth It for College?

Hybrids, also known as 2-in-1 notebooks, can function as traditional clamshell-style laptops when needed but transform into tablets when sketching, scribbling, or marking up a document is your main task. Some (generally called convertibles) sport a folding design that flips the keyboard out of the way, usually by rotating around its hinge so the screen and keyboard are back-to-back.

Others (dubbed detachables) let you dock a tablet (the screen portion) with an accessory keyboard when you want laptop-like functionality. While these devices are tablets first, some do provide the level of performance you'd expect from a laptop, though most are more comfortable to use on a desk than in your lap. What they do better than any laptop is let you take handwritten notes just as you would with pen and paper, making them ideal for many types of study. Microsoft's Surface Pro slates are at the forefront in terms of power and design for detachables.

A budget 2-in-1 might be just what you need to fill several roles. One thing to be mindful of: If you're considering a detachable design, make sure the keyboard cover or base and stylus pen are included in the price. Some manufacturers (notably, Microsoft) charge extra for these accessories, hiking your total cost considerably.

How Long a Warranty to Get for a College Laptop?

Almost every laptop, for college or otherwise, you buy today is backed by at least a one-year parts and labor warranty. Extended warranties are also available, but whether they're worth it depends on who you are as a user.

For starters, know that standard warranties don't cover breakdowns that stem from a spilled drink or a drop onto a sidewalk. Most manufacturers sell accident coverage as a separate plan atop their extended warranties, so it's not uncommon to spend close to $300 for three years of coverage. Apple offers a maximum extended warranty of three years, while some makers of Windows laptops offer up to four years.

In our opinion, if a warranty costs more than 15% of the total laptop price, you're better off spending the money on backup drives or cloud services that minimize downtime in case something does go awry. Of course, you can't put a price on peace of mind. In rare instances, the logic board or the display—the most expensive pieces of a laptop—can fail, with repairs costing half or more of what a new laptop would. Faulty inner components (except the battery) usually break down during the first year, however; any glitches after that are probably more about regular wear and tear.

Again, though, your college or university may be a pleasant surprise X-factor. Some schools have special arrangements with specific vendors for on-site laptop service, so it could pay to check with the campus bookstore or computer store to see if any such special circumstances apply. For example, it's possible to get parts and repairs for your Lenovo ThinkPad done overnight.

So, Ready to Buy the Right Laptop for College?

We hope our guide has helped! True, you'll see more choices on the market today than ever, and slogging through them can be daunting. No worries, though: We've done the work for you in our list above and in our detailed spec chart. If you (or the student you're shopping for) is closer to graduation than orientation, also check out our guide to the best laptop for each type of graduate, which offers career-specific options. And for more general factors to look for when shopping, check out our overall top laptop picks, as well as our favorite budget notebooks.