I need a new laptop for school. Have any suggestions?

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Jus' wondering.

I'm going to an art school, by the way, where I'll be studying animation, design and digital arting in general.

I strongly recommend a MacBook Pro; but, if for some reason you don't want to buy Apple, the HP Tablet PC is quite nice assuming you can tolerate its small display. The Tablet PC of course has a built-in digitizer, which I imagine would be a distinct advantage for an artist.

the macbook is rather expensive for the performance so if economy is an issue i would go with an hp or samsung labtop.

there is plenty of software for both systems, on a mac they come preinstalled,

Id personally pick toshiba over HP from my own and other people experiences.

But the bottom line is what kinda of work are we talking about for at school? If your going to be doing graphic design, animation and such, a mac book/mac book pro is the standard. If its just for basic Coursework needs (Word Proc, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and internet) any laptop "SHOULD" work fine. (Unless your doing programming and such but id need coursework information before truly recommending you anything.)

EDIT: Ahh didn't notice the art school being mentioned. So yeah A Mac book pro is standard fare for the scenario. (Some art schools require that specific laptop, so id actually ask before buying a thing. My sister and her friend have gone through the annoyance of it all) If they don't require it and you want to save some money, You are going to want to look for something with a good processor and reasonable graphics capability for acceleration features in programs such as photoshop. (Id Say something with an Intel i5 and an actual mobile solution by Nvidia or ATI instead of going with generic Intel HD Video processing which eats up precious memory and CPU cycles. You also would want something with plenty of memory, 4GB being the minumum. A cooling mat is another must-have though, don't need that laptop baking itself.)

Really there isn't all that much difference in computers anymore, now that Macs use the Intel chip. As others have said, check and see if the school requires a specific brand (standardization makes it easier to teach the class). If you want to be on the safe side, just buy a powerful computer.

If you are just doing images and pictures, pretty much any laptop will do. If you are doing graphics or video, then you will want to concentrate on the video card on the laptop, since those use the GPU for the work. As others have said, get all the memory that you can, which also means to make sure you get a 64 bit operating system as well. I haven't looked at laptops lately, so I don't know how many don't come with 64 bit OS, just mentioning that.

Computer technology is not changing so fast these days, so it's kinda hard to go wrong.

even when i worked with a mac i would use 3rd party image and editing software so the "mac standard" is a dying concept.

bottom line it might be worth it if you can pay for the lighter pc and your school teach in mac programs primarily(even that can be worked through with gimp or similar)

The thing is some schools outright demand The Mac Version of CS5 nowadays, so no, you really cant just get away with gimp during instruction unless your instructor specifically states you can. As for out on actual business projects, you use what you got unless you specifically need another program for a feature that the other doesnt have..

Thank you for your responses you've been helpful. And no, my school doesn't require that I have a Mac. I prefer PCs anyway.

true,

It helps to contact the school and find out what specs a laptop should have for what you will likely need to do at the school. Otherwise you are just guessing.

I would recommend go to QVC.com and you can get a nice laptop on payments 17.3" HP laptop for cheap! They have all types of computers.

If you're doing creative stuff, definitely get a MacBook Pro. Get a refurb or a used one if you can't afford it brand new.

Get yourself a MacBook?! Way, way, waaaaaaaaaay too expensive and a magnet for the light-fingered.

Get yourself a netbook. Much cheaper and less attractive to thieves.

And completely useless for doing anything that isn't "opening an internet browser".

Just get some insurance and back your data up, anything that's portable and worth at least £100 is attractive to thieves anyway, can't live life being paranoid.

or just intimidate the s**t out of thieves like I have a tendency to do. Ive had one admit to casing me but decided otherwise because of my behaviors XD

That and the fact that if they held out a knife or gun I still wouldn't give a s**t (plus I tend to walk out in highly visible areas, so if you do pull s**t you are f****d regardless.