How much space is reasonable on a Hard Drive for a student?

REads

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May 11, 2014
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I am soon going to be going to college and I need a new laptop. Problem is, is that I'm not very computer smart. What would be a reasonable amount of Hard Drive, RAM, and other categories such as that that will be sufficient for college use?
 

Goodeggray

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Sep 10, 2011
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It all depends on how you plan to use the laptop. Video and pictures eat up a lot more storage than music and documents. Weight factors a lot too. If you plan on carrying the laptop all the time. Tell us more on how you want to use the laptop. Most of the people on this forum are power users.
 

gumbykid

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Jan 15, 2014
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Is it just for schoolwork or also for gaming?

For schoolwork you'll want 4+ GB of RAM. I used to run off a 250GB HDD and had no problems with a few games and schoolwork, however a more reasonable amount is 500GB. You should get an i5 preferably just for snappiness, i7s are optional. Screensize depends if you want more real estate for gaming and how much you want to carry. GPU depends on gaming.
 

St0rm_KILL3r

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Depends on what and how much are you going to store in it.
If it's only college stuff then 500gb will be more than enough, you will still have a lot of space left even after a year.
But if you will be using it for other purposes too, like gaming, watching movies, videos, images, etc. then a 1 tb - 750 gb hdd should be the least.
And 8 gb is recomended (depends on what you do). 6-8 gb can work.
 
Just for college? You'll never even fill a 250GB HDD with assignments, notes, and college related stuff. I have a 320GB in my netbook for college and it's at like 70GB full after 2 years, and I could reduce that if I ever bothered to get rid of old stuff.
For other stuff besides college? 500GB.

Ram will work between 4GB-8GB. Less than that and it's probably in an underpowered system anyway.

For a CPU, pretty much anything 2.0Ghz+. Less than that and you get into low-end netbook range. Anything above 2.0Ghz is probably an i3/i5/haswell pentium/mid-range APU, etc, which would be perfect for college purposes and general use.
 
Excellent advice in this thread already

As a student you'll want to stuff as much of your schoolwork onto cloud storage as possible. Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox are both excellent products. They're accessible online, so you will be able to access your work from any computer that has internet access, very handy for the occasional time where you forget your laptop or can't use it.