8 Key Factors & Indicators to Choose a Laptop for Effective Coding

Choosing the right laptop is key to increase your productivity as a developer, either you are working at a software development company like MLSDev or similar. This may seem challenging at first, but knowing the most important indicators of a good laptop will help you here.

Whether you are a web developer or just studying computer science, a good-quality laptop is a must for effective coding. If you want, you can write code on almost all laptops. However, when choosing the right machine with suitable features for your tasks, your productivity will improve drastically.

Here Are The Main Features You Need To Consider When Choose A Laptop For Effective Coding:

1. Mobility

If you work in different locations, it’s worth considering a 13 or 14-inch laptop. It’s not as heavy as 15-inch laptops, better to carry around. It also has longer battery life, which is also important as you may work far from the power outlet.

2. Powerful CPU

A powerful processor is one of the most critical indicators of a good laptop for coding. It makes a significant difference in laptop performance. To find a laptop with a powerful processor, you need to consider the specifications, such as the number of cores, cache size, frequency, and thermal design power.

A fast processor is essential when you are dealing with big projects or applications that have intensive graphics. The recommended processors are Intel Core i5 or Intel i7 with a frequency of 3GHz. Once you check out the laptop characteristics, in UserBenchmark you may compare with the CPU benchmarks.

3. RAM

RAM (Random Access Memory) should be no less than 4GB. It’s also recommended to choose a laptop with 16 GB of RAM. Software developers usually need to run IDEs, virtual machines that require more RAM to complete their projects.

Depending on the tasks you perform on your laptop, the RAM size may range from 4GB to 16GB. A laptop with 8GD of RAM can be considered ideal for basic tasks. A good RAM, together with an effective storage configuration, will make your coding more effective.

4. Storage and Capacity

Reliable Solid State Drive (SSD) will make every operation on your laptop a lot faster. Booting up, loading projects, or launching different applications will not take as much time as it would on a laptop with a standard hard drive.

That’s why it should be your top priority to choose the computer with no less than 256Gb SSD. Of course, you can get 512GD or 1TB SSD if that fits your budget.

5. Keyboard

When choosing a laptop, the keyboard seems not a very important feature. However, if you code, you will do a lot of typing for an extended period of time. Having a good full-size keyboard will make your experience using a laptop more comfortable.

Test the laptop’s keyboard before buying and make sure it has decent travel and the keystrokes have a soft touch. It’s good to test out if you can easily reach all of the functions that you’re commonly using. It would be best if you also chose a backlit keyboard as it gives you the advantage of working in a low-light environment.

6. Battery Life

If you’re mainly working near the power outlet, then this feature is not very important for you. Still, it’s better to have a laptop with at least 6 hours of battery life. A great tip here is to make sure you read reviews about the laptop’s battery life to know other users’ experiences. You can not solely rely on the expected battery life stated by the manufacturer.

7. Display

As a programmer, you are spending a lot of time staring at your display. It’s essential to check if the display has good viewing angles. The screen should not double as a mirror. It’s recommended to buy a Full HD 1920 x 1080(1080 p) display, as it will allow you to multitask and get a comfortable reading experience.

If you’re working for long hours on your laptop, you should also consider getting a laptop with an IPS screen, which doesn’t strain your eyes that much.

8. Operating System

One last essential point in laptop selection is the need to determine on which operating system your laptop will work. Generally, you have options like Windows with more options available and macOS with limited offers.

If you choose Linux, get the system with the official Linux support, even though it runs on most of the hardware. Suppliers like Dell already provide great laptops with Linux being pre-installed, which is a good option to consider first.

In Conclusion 

As mentioned above, it’s important to consider features, such as mobility, display, battery life, keyboard, SSD, RAM, and CPU. Taking these aspects into account, you will find the right laptop that will suit your tasks best. This will help to improve your productivity in your coding work individually or as a part of a dedicated development team that works on the complex project together.