3 Budget laptops for casual tasks Let's clear things up a bit. Laptops are portable clamshell computers that are battery/AC operated. These days they are called, "Chromebook", "Netbook", "Notebook" and well simply laptops. These small form factor PCs usually run a version of a desktop operating system like Microsoft Windows but some can run cloud-based OSes like Google's ChromeOS or the feature-limited Windows S mode. I should also make it very clear that if you require a "Laptop" computer to do heavy work like animation, video/audio editing these listed here will not perform well unless it's very light versions of these tasks using simple software from the different app stores not anything like Adobe Premier Pro! College students use their laptops in the classrooms to take notes, for homework, general research, curricular and extracurricular activities. This has been the norm for at least the past 12