Every autumn, families spend hundreds of euros on gadgets for students starting university. According to IT advisers at Elmbridge University, many of those purchases end up in a drawer. Their advice for this year is simple: buy one dependable laptop first, and only add a tablet if the course genuinely calls for it.
The laptop is still the workhorse
Essays, spreadsheets, coding, statistics software and online exams still run best on a full computer with a keyboard. Advisers say a mid-range model with 16 GB of memory and a battery that lasts a full day of lectures is enough for almost every subject.
Students come to us with expensive machines built for gaming and a battery that dies by lunchtime. A lighter laptop that survives eight hours is far more useful.
Nadia Okafor, student IT support lead at Elmbridge University
Design, architecture and engineering students are the exception. Their departments usually publish minimum requirements for graphics-heavy software, and it is worth checking those before buying anything.
When a tablet makes sense
A tablet with a stylus earns its place for students who annotate a lot of reading, sketch diagrams or take handwritten notes in mathematics and medicine. For everyone else, it is often a second screen that duplicates what the laptop already does.
Advisers recommend testing note-taking on a borrowed tablet for a week before buying. The library at Elmbridge lends them for exactly that reason.
The phone is not a study device
Almost every student already owns a smartphone, and it does play a role: two-factor login codes, campus apps, quick photos of the whiteboard. But writing longer texts on a phone is slow, and advisers warn that notifications are the biggest enemy of concentration during lectures.
Before you pay
A few checks can save money:
- ask whether the university offers discounted software licenses before buying any
- compare student prices, which can be 10 to 15 percent lower
- look at refurbished laptops with a warranty
- set aside money for a backup drive or cloud storage
Finally, advisers remind students that a popular chatbot may help with summaries, but most universities now publish clear rules on what AI tools may be used for in graded work. Read them in the first week, not the night before a deadline.
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