College Laptop Advice

SwagasaurusRex

SwagasaurusRex

Member
Next year I will be a freshman in college and I was wondering what laptop will give me the best bang for my buck. I will be using your day to day programs from Photoshop to anything else you can think of for college use. I will not be playing games such as Battlefield 3 on it, so an insanely expensive graphics card is not necessary. Also, I much prefer the Windows operating system. I have been using a laptop with Windows for school since my freshman year of high school and do not want to switch over to a Mac. Also at this point, the budget is not important, as I would like the laptop to last me all four years of undergrad.

K+ to any suggestions.
 
Dell Latitude is still goin strong for 5+ years. Got it senior year of high school. I love Dell's and have yet to ever have it serviced. The battery is still strong and the only grope i have is that it gets hot pretty quick. But performance and reliability are still real high.
 
You have three reputable brands to choose from: Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba. Everything else is shit. If you want to run programmatical and computationally heavy applications, I would recommend at least 6GB DDR3 Ram and an AMD processor, which has a built in FPU that makes numerics potentially very accurate. If you're looking for gaming on your laptop, AMD does not make the best lower-tier GPU's so I'd go with an integrated GPU/CPU (i.e. Sandy/Ivy bridge from Intel, or llano from AMD), otherwise, go with Intel. 4 cores is alot, so don't worry about 2 cores at a high GHz rating. It'll run fast regardless. I'd recommend 15-17inch screens if you happen to be social, or, as I do, enjoy panorama more than a cramped 13 inch screen. 500GB HDD minimum, SSD if you can afford one. There's no point in mentioning anything else. Look up relevant choices on Newegg, or another site like it, and your search will be made easy.
 
Oh, and don't let them install Windows 8 on your laptop with out your permission. UEFI is cancer, and windows 8 is a poor excuse for an OS. As chicken said, have a LiveUSB with an uptodate distro ready for your laptop when it comes.
 
Get a macbook pro! lol jk. essentially go with what he said^. if you search around on those conditions you'll find something solid
 
i got tired of myself and others getting disposable windows laptops, every 18months needing a new one. I got a Mac pro 3 years ago and it has not blinked. Start up fast, never freezes. I'm not going to hate andbe subjective toward Windows... but trust me man, i know few people with macs and none are new, all years old, they do not just starting down the same... plus the stock memory..
 
I was looking for one for a while and after intense research, Ive settled on the Sony Vaio S series 15. It has basic graphic capabilities (maybe a bit above average for its class). Its thin, has gotten good reviews and is extremely powerful. I had different interests than you though.
 
have you considered a tablet? such as the Asus transformer? there's a keyboard dock attachment you can get. Tablets are more portable and sometimes cheaper and you can get a stylus for your image creation/editing. On top of that, some tablets have cellular data capabilities so you can access the internet while you travel
 
I rock a Dell for work and HP for home use. if you want it to last and remain quick and snappy, invest in a solid state drive and do a clean install of Windows 7 (do NOT get Windows 8)

btw i'm a system admin by trade so i deal with this shit errday
 
oh and if you're getting windows make sure you have a way to get windows 7 on there cause 8 sucks phat dong at this point
 
So if I were to get an Asus laptop, what would you suggest I get. I am going to set my budget at around $1,000. It can go a little above if it is worth it. Also a link to the product would be fantastic.
 
Ive started hating apple recently. Windows computers used to be hella slow all the time and macs were way better. But now im starting to think windows has changed from where is was 5 years ago. I actually do a lot of work on my windows desktop than i do my mac which is in my room. I went from windows xp to 5 years later just started using windows 5 and its mad nice.
 
Why do people always make arguments like this? It's his money, so why do you give a shit how he spends it? Why buy a Ferrari when you could buy a Ford Fusion? It'll still get you from point A to point B, right?
 
yeah, implying that $1,000 is 100% of his disposable income

$1000 is perfectly reasonable for a PC...that's barely getting you in the door in the Apple world
 
I use a mac and I love it, but I didn't come here to tell you to switch haha. I don't know a whole lot about like non apple laptops unless they have some awesome new feature, but as far as general advice, I would say definitely get one with built in hdmi, and I would go for 15" because 17" gets really annoying to lug around if you can even find a bag to fit it haha. ram is usually easy enough to upgrade on your own, but this may not be the case if it is something like an ultra book, so that is worth looking into. If you want it to last all 4 years, get one with the fastest and newest processor and video card. they will likely be the standard by the time you graduate, so you will still be able to handle most things. It is also important because these, unlike ram, are usually impossible to upgrade. Get yourself decent speakers for your desk, I haven't heard any that can rival a decent set of speakers (these can be had pretty cheap, but you may want to account for it in your budget). Also get an external hard drive, and lastly, make sure it has an easily replaceable battery, as these tend to die or at least severely weaken after some time and likely will within 4 years. If you have the budget, you may want to look into a third party warranty that covers accidental damage or at least see if it would be worth it to you. hope something in there is helpful
 
get somthing water proof and shock proof, all computors are pretty similar so go for durribiltly. GET REALLY GOOD ANTI VIRUS!

i might just be a idiot but beer is a computors number one enemie. you will get drunk and spill stuff, drop stuff, and look at wierd shit on line.

sorry for the spelling
 
Lenovo y500 ideapad.

I5 processor

Dual nvidia graphics cards

1tb hdd

6gb ddr3 ram

Full 1080p hd screen

Ad all of the extra bells and whistles that companies like HP charge extra for.

All this for $889. I did tons of research and for the price, this laptop is nigh impossible to beat. If you dont want to game, you can get it with a disk drive or a 2nd ssd drive instead of the dual gpu's

 
check out samsung's series 9 "chrome" laptops.. they're just under a grand and have awesome specs on em.

i5 processor

200 gig solid state hard drive

300 gig hard drive

6gigs ram, (i now have 8 gigs of ram)

they're display screens are awesome. samsung customer service was great.. i had a minimal defect on my screen (a hot spot), called em up within my warrenty year, and had my laptop sent in and back with in 2 weeks. no problems.

all in all, its a great laptop.

as for windows 8, i'm still running 7, so i dont know anything about the new OS.
 
So it's still possible to buy a laptop with Windows 7 not 8? This was something I'd been wondering about because I've spent some time on Windows 8 and really don't like it. I know I could put the time in and get used to it but I much rather an intuitive OS even if it sacrifices some power.

Either that or I need to make my macbook survive until something new comes out which doesn't seem promising.
 
I'd get an Asus windows 8 touch screen.Asus makes really solid laptop that physically last a long time, Also Asus makes the motherboards for many companies such as HP so their computers get the best of whats out there.
 
I know you don't care to run games like bf3, but with a budget of $1000 you can get some pretty solid performance. I snagged my lenovo y500 for $850 about a month ago. Quad core i7, 1080 15.6" screen, 8gb of ram, and nvidia gt650m graphics card. It runs stuff like far cry 3 on high settings without issue and I love it thus far. Lenovo seems like great bang for your buck, judging off my and a couple friends' experiences.
 
The next gen processor tech will be announced in the next year or so, and has more to do with arch's like CUDA and split stack implementations than more cores or logical processors and threads. Don't invest now. Invest in a year or so. Also, this gen macbook has soldered ram and is impossible to fix yourself, or to upgrade should you need it at all. Mac is also incompatible omwith most linux distros unless you have a good handle on sysadminship.
 
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