Don't blindly buy a gaming laptop if you're a CS student. Learn from my mistake

I just wanted to share my experience with juniors who are about to buy a laptop for college.When I was buying mine, I got completely attracted to gaming laptops. The RGB, RTX 4050, high refresh rate display, gaming benchmarks—everything looked amazing. I convinced myself that I needed a gaming laptop because "what if I start gaming?"So I bought a **Lenovo LOQ (RTX 4050)**.

Fast forward to today, I'm mainly doing DSA, coding, and college work. Reality hit me pretty hard.

The laptop weighs around **3 kg with the charger**. Carrying it to college every day is tiring.

The charger itself is huge and heavy.

For maximum performance, and even light task you almost always have to keep it plugged in.

It's great for gaming, but not the most convenient machine for a student who carries it everywhere.

Since buying it, I've probably played only 40–50 hours of games in total.

That's it.

The laptop spends 99% of its time running VS Code, Chrome with 20 tabs, LeetCode, and YouTube.

Looking back, I honestly think I would've been happier with something like a MacBook Air (if macOS fits your workflow) or a lightweight Windows laptop like a Samsung Galaxy Book, ASUS Zenbook, or similar. Better battery life, much lighter, quieter, and far more comfortable for daily college use.

I'm not saying gaming laptops are bad. If you're genuinely into gaming, game development, 3D rendering, AI/ML with heavy local training, or other GPU-intensive work, they absolutely make sense.

But if you're buying one just because it looks cool or because you think you'll game a lotthink twice.