I’m reminded by a piece in Digital Trends that this is back to school laptop buying season. So, I have some advice.

1) Don’t go back to school. There is a pandemic.

2) But you still need a laptop, but don’t get suckered into buying a “gaming laptop” so you can game and oh, also, do your school work on it. See the above linked commentary for a convincing argument, but here I’ll just point out three problems with a gaming laptop for school.

a) They are expensive, and even if you get a cheap one, the resources you are buying are mainly for super fancy graphics, which are not homework.

b) They run hot and burn through batteries like [insert metaphor here when I think of it later].

c) There are cheaper and easier ways to demonstrate to your new friends at college that you are a gamer geek.

3) I recently bought a laptop, and in so doing, narrowed the good ones down to two, one by Dell (Dell XPS 13 9310 Touchscreen or some version thereof) and one by HP (Envy x360 2-in-1 15.6″ Touch-Screen or some version thereof). Check out the different options and sizes. I got the HP a few months ago because at the time it was the only 17 inch available). A third option is the one by Lenovo mentioned in the above cited piece (Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano), but I don’t have research on that. At one time Lenovo was the only laptop I’d buy, but then IBM sold them off and the quality range shifted. I don’t know of the current status of that make.