Looking for a laptop for college. Very confused

Post Reply New Topic

I'm looking for a laptop to use for college. I have ben looking at netbooks and larger laptops with built in disk drives and more storage. I'm woried that netbooks are designed for just email and internet browsing. How do they handle playing media or word processing? My dad thinks I should look at laptops with a built in disk drive, hard drive size of 250-320 gigabytes and 2 gigs of RAM.

CRITERIA:

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium

RAM: 2 gigs

HDD size: 250-320 gigs

Battery: 2-3 hours

Optical drive: DVD/CD

Don't care about CPU

PRICE: no more than 500

If you can help me find laptops with that criteria it would be very helpful to me.

With that amount of memory, I would hope it's a 64bit version as it does make a difference compared to the same thing on 32bit. (I installed 32 and 64bit on the same computer)

My question on the hard drive is: Do you need one of that size for college use? Wouldn't 80GB + Vista (140GB) be enough. Remembering that bigger hard drives need to be faster and therefore use up valuable battery power

Plenty of people, myself included, use low-cost laptops for work, including word processing and more. The specs you mentioned should cover your basic needs. If you're performing complex mathematical simulations or statistical analysis, or get into compiling codes or heavy-duty graphics, your system will slow to a crawl. Otherwise, you'll be fine.

Keith makes an excellent point about the HD. Smaller is better. It will save you money, reduce the weight of the machine, and most important, increase battery life. Unless you plan to download and keep lots of MP3s, TV shows or movies, or whatever other large files on the HD at all times, you can get by with a smaller drive, and buy an external drive to offload old files you don't need, or back them up using the CD/DVD.

A netbook would more than suffice for word processing. Do you need that much storage? I know that for myself, my personal files (including all my college assignments) take only a few gigabytes of hard drive space. My HD is 160GB, and after dividing that in three (I triple-booted) I was more than able to fit everything I needed on each partition. That amount of RAM will probably work for your needs in college.


You would be using Windows 7 though, right? I think it's a free upgrade if you buy a new machine now, and if it's at all possible for you to run something that is not Vista, do it.

I'm in Scotland and got my laptop through my university's Student Laptop Scheme. This meant I got it at a discount and had the reassurance of knowing that it would meet my requirements. There were three different categories of laptops available under the scheme, recommended according to what type of course you were studying and what you would want to do with your laptop.

It might be worth checking out if your college or any educational/student organisation in your area offer any similar schemes.

Well, as the salesmen and women used to say "buy all the computer you can afford," but they would say that, wouldn't they?

As with any tool, your first question should be 'what do I want to do with it?" Unles you're going to be playing games, a netbook would likely be more than you need. If Dad's paying for it, go with what he can afford...

I found a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook for $342.99 on Amazon. It runs on a 1.6 gigahertz Intel Atom proccessor running Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 3, 1 gig of RAM and a 160 gig hard drive. I'm paying for it out of my own pocket and will have enough to purchase an external DVD drive with any leftover money I have. Once Windows 7 is in stores and I have the money for a bigger hard drive and more RAM, I'll install Windows 7 and dual boot it with Ubuntu.

My Eee PC makes life worth living. Her name is Joline and she sleeps besides my bed. Utterly brilliant for word processing, net browsing and retro games.

Sounds decent, but it's a bit low-end just so you know what you're getting into. The Atom is not a very powerful processor, but it should suffice for typical use. As long as you aren't doing a lot of heavy number-crunching type things, or expecting hard-core gaming performance, that machine sounds like a good choice. A RAM upgrade is definitely a good idea.