How much space should a college student have on their laptop?

Personally, I would get:

RAM: at least 8gb, and preferably 16gb.

Hard Drive: At least 500gb, and preferably 1tb.

I strongly suggest a SSD to survive better than a drive with moving parts.

My laptop:

MacBook Pro 8 GB ram, 2tb SSD. But wish I had 16gb ram.

Note: 2 ways to run Windows:

Virtual: VMWare or Parallels

Boot: Can boot to a pure Windows startup via free Bootcamp.

With a Mac, you can run both Windows and Mac apps. But that's another reason to get a larger hard drive!

You will need at least 500 GB of storage, better still 1 TB.

You will need at least 8 GB of RAM.

Specifically for school work, you won t need a ton of storage. If you used more than 100GB of storage just for school work for your entire college career then you would be well above average. In fact, you should be able to keep just about everything you need past and present on a simple thumb drive.

However, there are some caveats to this. If you use digital textbooks that aren t cloud saved then you might want to consider a bit more storage. Although this is pretty uncommon.

You are also going to want to consider how much personal storage you need. For example, are you going to be saving movies and music? Maybe even games? I am of the opinion that 1TB of storage is the bare minimum that someone should have on any computer that they own. The problem is that this can be an expensive proposition, especially with solid state storage.

That being said, depending on what MacBook you get, you should come out of the gate with 500GB of storage, so you won t ever need much more. If you do, then you can pick up a cheap external HDD for everything extra.

As far as where to find a refurbished MacBook, Newegg is your best bet. https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Su...

Adding an external hard drive (or using cloud services)is a cheap and easy solution if your computer has a smaller drive, so you should focus more on the performance than the hard drive.

But the things that take up space are videos and pictures. Other office files, pdfs, etc don't take up much space.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?cp=1&s...

Depends what course you're doing.

If it's art, photography or film making - you will need vast amounts of space, plus several external drives.

If it's Computer Science - you obviously won't be using a Mac.