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Best laptop for students UK 2024: Fast, reliable student laptops

Looking to take notes in lectures, research online and get your coursework polished off? These laptops go straight to the top of the class

Using the right tool for the right job is crucial when studying, meaning there’s never a bad time to invest in the best laptop for students you can afford.

Demand for student laptops surged during the pandemic, with students of all ages needing reliable devices to use both at home and in the classroom.

We’ve tested a huge range of laptops and this article documents those we deem best suited for student life.

Your age, the level at which you’re studying and your budget will determine which student laptop is right for you, so we’ve also included a buying guide detailing the key things to consider when buying a laptop for school, college or university.

Whether you’re in the market for something lightweight and versatile or something that will pack a punch performance-wise, we’ve got an option for you. There’s a student laptop to suit everyone’s needs and, importantly, budget. Read on to find your perfect studying companion.


Best laptop for students: At a glance

Best overallM1 Apple MacBook Air (~£849)Check price at John Lewis
Best budget laptopHP Pavilion 14 SE (14-ep0524sa) (~£449)Check price at Currys
Best for creative tasksAsus Vivobook S15 OLED (~£998)Check price at Amazon
Best ChromebookAsus Chromebook Plus CX34 (~£300)Check price at Amazon

How to choose the best laptop for school, college or university

How much should I spend on a student laptop?

Depending on what your studies involve and whether you plan on using your laptop for play as well as work, you can spend anywhere between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand pounds on a student laptop.

If you’re on a tight budget or buying a laptop for your child to use for schoolwork, we recommend checking out our list of the best cheap laptops and the best laptops for kids.

However, if you want a device that will last you a number of years and has the capability to support a spot of light gaming, we recommend spending between £500 and £1,000. In this price bracket, you’ll find laptops that offer impressive performance coupled with attractive build quality.

READ NEXT: Best school bags

Do I need a fast processor and loads of RAM?

Processors and RAM aren’t too important if you just want a laptop for writing essays on – even a cheap Chromebook is good enough for Google Docs and searching the internet.

However, if your studies require the use of more demanding software for photo or video editing, 3D design or crunching databases, it’s worth putting money towards a more powerful CPU. Intel’s Core i5 and i7 processors are a solid choice – especially if you go for the newer 11th, 12th and 13th generation versions. Meanwhile, AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 range of processors often rival Intel’s in terms of performance, but come with a smaller price tag, while Apple’s M1 and M2 processors can give some Core i7 CPUs a run for their money. Even the cheapest M1 MacBook Air is a highly capable study and research machine.

More RAM is always welcome, as it means you can leave more applications and browser tabs open before your laptop grinds to a halt. You should look for a laptop with at least 8GB of RAM, and 16GB is even better if your budget allows it.

How much storage do I need?

This will be determined by how you plan on using your student laptop. If you’re going to be saving lots of documents locally and plan on downloading numerous apps, you’ll find storage gets eaten up pretty quickly. A laptop with 256GB of storage will suffice for most students, but 512GB is a safer bet if you don’t want to have to uninstall and delete things a year or two after buying your new device.

It’s important to look at the type of storage a laptop has in addition to how much of it you’re getting. A student laptop with a proper SSD (solid-state drive) is preferable to one with a cheaper eMMC flash drive.

What else do I need to look out for?

If you can try out a laptop before buying, then do so. Everyone has a different idea about what constitutes a comfy, usable keyboard or touchpad, and while we pay close attention to those aspects in our reviews, it’s well worth trying it out for yourself. Equally, what some people might consider a heavy, bulky laptop might be entirely manageable by other people’s standards.

Similarly, it’s worth keeping an eye out for the number of USB-C or USB 3 ports. The faster USB 3.2 Gen 2 versions are worth paying extra for if you need additional storage or backup through a fast external drive, and you’ll also have more options for connecting monitors and other devices.

It’s well worth leaving some room in your budget for a good external USB hard drive or SSD, or just making sure you use a cloud storage service such as OneDrive or Google Drive to keep your documents backed up. Even the best laptop for students can be damaged, lost or stolen, so it pays to make sure your coursework doesn’t disappear along with it.


How we test laptops for students

At Expert Reviews, we have decades of experience reviewing laptops so we can intuitively tell a good laptop from a bad one. However, we still need to be sure we’re being as unbiased as possible in our assessments, and to do that we run every single laptop we’re sent through a series of benchmark tests.

We test performance with a combination of in-house benchmarking software, third-party benchmarking tools and games tests. We also measure a laptop’s screen using a colorimeter and the DisplayCAL software. And we test storage speed, too, recording sequential transfer speeds.

Of course, no suite of laptop benchmarks would be complete without some kind of battery life assessment, and we test this by playing a video on loop and seeing how long it takes to run the battery flat from 100%. We also ensure we actually use every laptop to write on, watch videos, browse the web, carry out video calls and more.

READ NEXT: Best external hard drives


The best laptops for students in 2024

1. M1 Apple MacBook Air: Still the best laptop for students

Price when reviewed: £849 | Check price at John Lewis

The M1 Apple MacBook Air pictured on a patterned bedspread

The M1 MacBook Air is now nearly four years old, but Apple still sells it at a premium price and it still makes an excellent laptop for many student’s studies. Battery life is its principle selling point, with performance in our video playback test exceeding 14 hours.

That, coupled with its supreme build quality and its light weight, makes it the perfect device to carry around all day, from your accommodation to campus, from tutorials to lecture theatres and everywhere in between.

Other laptops have surpassed it when it comes to pure performance. The 15in M2 MacBook Air is a more accomplished all-rounder but for value, there are very few laptops that deliver – and continue to deliver – as convincingly as the M1 MacBook Air.

Read our full M1 Apple MacBook Air (2020) review 

Key specs – Processor: Octa-core Apple M1; RAM: 8GB; Storage: 256GB SSD; Screen size: 13.3in; Screen resolution: 2,560 x 1,600; Weight: 1.29kg

Check price at John Lewis


2. HP Pavilion SE 14 (14-ep0524sa): Best budget laptop for students

Price when reviewed: £449 | Check price at Currys

HP Pavilion SE 14 open, on a table facing to the left

If your degree course merely requires you to have access to a half-decent laptop and you don’t want to pay more than £500 then HP’s 14in Pavilion SE is certainly worth looking at. For your money, you get a very decent compact machine with modern underpinnings, no serious flaws and rather stylish looks.

The keyboard is excellent, the display is competent if a little drab and, given the low cost, the configuration is surprisingly modern, with an Intel Core i5-1335U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a capacious 512GB of SSD storage. We were also surprised at how good the 1080p webcam and the speakers are.

Its main weakness is its battery life, which in our testing only reached 6hrs 30mins before dying. It’s also slightly disappointing that the keyboard doesn’t have a backlight. Still, given the low price, it’s very hard to complain. This is a great all-rounder at a very tempting price.

Read our full HP Pavilion SE 14 review 

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core i5-1335U; GPU: Intel Iris Xe; RAM: 8GB; Display size: 14in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Display type: IPS 60Hz; Storage: 512GB; Dimensions: 324 x 215 x 18mm (WDH); Weight: 1.4kg

Check price at Currys

3. Asus Vivobook S15 OLED: Best laptop for student creatives

Price when reviewed: £998 | Check price at Amazon

Asus Vivobook S15 OLED on a table against a white background

If you thought OLED laptops were expensive and out of your reach as a student, then prepare to have the Asus Vivobook S15 prove you wrong. This machine is packed to the gunnels with high-powered hardware, has a vibrant display that’s perfect for working on creative projects, and yet it’s not that much more expensive than a four-year-old M1 MacBook Air.

It comes with a 15.6in Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) OLED display that reaches levels of brightness rarely seen in a laptop, and the display also covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour space, making it the perfect companion not only for those creative projects, but also for bingeing on Netflix shows when you get back to your student accommodation in the evening.

Add long battery life (it lasted 10hrs 40mins in our video playback test), a decent keyboard and a very good 1080p webcam and you have a superb all rounder. For less than £1,000, it’s a very tough package to beat.

Read our full Asus Vivobook S15 OLED review

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core i7-13700H; GPU: Intel Arc 350M; RAM: 16GB; Display size: 15.6in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Display type: OLED 60Hz; Storage: 1TB SSD; Dimensions: 356 x 229 x 18mm (WDH); Weight: 1.7kg


4. Acer Aspire 7 (A715-76G): Best student laptop with discrete GPU

Price when reviewed: £749 | Check price at Amazon

Acer Aspire 7 pictured at a slight angle, facing to the right

Not every student has the budget to splash on a £1,000 MacBook or OLED powerhouse, but if you still need something with enough power to dispatch all sorts of tasks, from video editing to programming, coding and mathematical modelling, this Acer Aspire has a lot to recommend it.

It comes with a 144Hz display and an Nvidia GeForce 2050 RTX GPU, so it can handle hardcore graphics tasks. And it couples that with a 12th Gen Intel H-series Core i5 CPU that’s plenty powerful enough for the most demanding of jobs.

The Acer has some other important strengths that should appeal to the away-from-home student. To start with, you can easily add more RAM and a second SSD. The keyboard is good, as is the battery life, which we tested at a solid 8hrs 28mins. It’s a well-made device, too, with an aluminium lid and a solid plastic body. The killer feature, though, is the price: for £749 you’re getting a lot of laptop for your money, and we’ve seen it on sale for £200 less.

Read our full Acer Aspire 7 review 

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core i5-12450H; GPU: Nvidia RTX 2050; RAM: 8GB; Display size: 15.6in; Display resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Display type: IPS 144Hz; Storage: 512GB; Dimensions: 363 x 236 x 20mm (WDH); Weight: 2.1kg

5. Apple MacBook Air 15in (M2, 2023): Best no-compromise laptop for students

Price when reviewed: £1,399 | Check price at John Lewis | Amazon

Apple MacBook Air 15in (M2) on a table, at an angle, in an office setting

The M1 MacBook might be a great laptop still, but it’s comprehensively outclassed by the newer M2-based MacBook Air machines, in particular this 15in model. It lasted an astonishing 15hrs 42mins in our battery life tests, meaning it’s ideally suited to life on campus, where you’ll be traipsing from tutorial to library to lecture hall – where there may not be the opportunity to plug it in – and still have full confidence in it lasting the full day.

It has plenty of other talents, too. The speaker system and microphones are hard to beat – perfect for creative projects, podcasting and video voiceovers, not to mention video calls back home – and the large 15.3in IPS display gives you plenty of space to multitask. The laptop’s build quality, slenderness and light weight means it won’t weigh you down much more than laptops with smaller, more cramped screens, and the M2 chip delivers enough grunt to power you through most workloads.

Sure, it’s pricey, but think of it as an investment. This is a laptop that will last you for years, is a pleasure to use and keeps going for an age away from the mains. It’s absolutely worth saving up the extra cash for.

Read our full Apple MacBook Air 15in (M2, 2023) review 

Key specs – Processor: Apple M2; GPU: Apple M2 8-core; RAM: 8GB; Display size: 13.6in; Display resolution: 2,560 x 1,664; Display type: IPS 60Hz; Storage: 256GB; Dimensions: 304 x 215 x 11.3mm (WDH); Weight: 1.24kg

6. Asus Chromebook Plus CX34: Best Chromebook for students

Price: £400 | Check price at Amazon | Currys

Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 - front slight angle, open

Chromebooks are a lot more capable than then used to be and, thanks to Google’s latest minimum spec “Chromebook Plus” category of machines, they’re easier to buy, too. This Asus is an example of the new breed. It’s a fairly basic 14in laptop but it’s got it where it counts. It has a Full HD 1080p IPS display, and an Intel Core i3 CPU, as per Google’s requirements. There’s a healthy 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, too.

Battery life isn’t bad, either, and ergonomically, the CX34 is perfectly okay. Our reviewer said the keyboard was a “rather fine piece of work” and it even comes with a backlight, which is not a given, even on much more expensive laptops. There’s a sharp 1080p webcam for video calls, too, and in combination with Google’s “Temporal Noise Reduction” system, this works well in most conditions, even low light.

With a robust design that meets US MIL-STD 810H durability standards, this practical machine was well priced at its launch price of £429 but we’ve seen it regularly dip below that to £300 and even as low as £250, at which price it is an outright bargain. If your needs are fairly basic when it comes to doing your school or university work and you don’t want to push the boat out to a more expensive Mac or Windows machine, the Asus Chromebook CX34 is well worth a look.

Read our full Asus Chromebook Plus CX34 review 

Key specs – Processor: Intel Core i3-1215U; RAM: 8GB; Storage: 128GB UFS; GPU: Intel Iris Xe; Screen size: 14in; Screen resolution: 1,920 x 1,080; Dimensions: 326 x 214 x 19mm (WDH); Weight: 1.29kg

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