Recommendation for a Laptop for a college student?

JJ Husker

JJ Husker

Assistant Coach
My son will be starting college this fall and I wanted to get him a laptop computer that would be helpful for school as well general use (email, movies, music, etc.). Does anyone have any recommendations or warnings as far as brands, screen size, RAM, hard drive etc.?

So far I am leaning towards an HP or Toshiba with about 650GB+ hard drive, 4-6 GB RAM, and I'm thinking a 14" or 15" display size. 17" seems maybe a little too big to be hauling around campus.

I'm more of a desktop PC type so any pointers for laptops would be appreciated. Thanks.

 
JJHusker1 said:
My son will be starting college this fall and I wanted to get him a laptop computer that would be helpful for school as well general use (email, movies, music, etc.). Does anyone have any recommendations or warnings as far as brands, screen size, RAM, hard drive etc.?

So far I am leaning towards an HP or Toshiba with about 650GB+ hard drive, 4-6 GB RAM, and I'm thinking a 14" or 15" display size. 17" seems maybe a little too big to be hauling around campus.

I'm more of a desktop PC type so any pointers for laptops would be appreciated. Thanks.
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I'd recommend a 15" or even a 13.3". (Used a 15 for years and switched to a 13.3 . . . no regrets.) I've heard better things about Toshiba than HP but I haven't owned a Windows machine in years. Many of my classmates had good experience with Lenovo as well.

Good luck.

 
It depends on your price range. I think if you're willing to spend in the $1200 range, then you should go for build quality over specs. Don't sweat the small differences in RAM or processor or whatever. For build quality, two recommendations --

1) Lenovo ThinkPad

2) Macbook Air

Thinkpads are built like tanks and have awesome keyboards (this is pretty important! but of course, it's not the main selling point).

Macbook Airs are incredibly sexy and very, very portable. The Pro's cost more and I think I'd prefer a Lenovo to those.

Also, don't worry about hard drive size. Instead, if you can afford it, opt for a SSD (solid state) drive. Performance wise it should be a tremendous boost in speed, and probably also reliability, than the standard ____ rpm HDDs that come in laptops. Solid state is the future. Just supplement it with an external if it's really needed, for extra storage.

I think portability is important. It's nice to have a laptop you can easily drag with you to lounges, your buddies' dorm rooms, etc. So I don't think I'd go with anything more than 14.

 
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Toshiba or a Mac.

Do not get a Dell or HP.

I, my fiance, dad, sister, best friend, roomate all had Toshibas and loved them. There batteries run low later in life--CD drives go to sh#t later on.. but not bad.

 
JJ, you sounded more interested in Windows machines so I didn't mention Macs . . . but if you are interested in that route you should take a long look at buying a refurb directly from Apple. (13.3" Pro is $929, for example). They have brand new cases and carry the exact same warranty as any other Mac. It'll save you hundreds of dollars. The one advantage of a Pro over an Air is that you do have a CD/DVD drive. Some classes had software/media on CDs. One more thing to keep in mind.

If you're only interested in Windows machines . . . disregard all of that. :P

 
Do not get a Macbook Air for a college student. I work in the computer store on campus and you are paying for strictly portability, or about 1.5 pounds in weight difference. They are severely limited on ports and do not have an optical drive, which may be nice for some programs your student might need to install. Besides, the wide range of ultrabooks that have come out recently have narrowed that gap substantially.

The first question I always ask, is what is going to be their major? I am at work now and will update my post later when I have more time to elaborate on different models.

 
Thanks for all the help so far everyone.

I've always been a Windows/PC guy so I had not considered a Mac but I might need to look at those.

I would say my price range is $600-$900. However, my son may choose to use some of that graduation cash to bump it up into a real machine.

The Lenova recommendations surprised me....I thought they were like an Acer or something- I hadn't even considered them. But, I will look a little harder at those as well.

BTW- He is starting as a business major with an economics minor. He thinks he wants to be a CPA.

 
Macbook Air. Cheapest one is $1100. It's a cloud based computer....so if you need lots of storage it is on the cloud not the hard drive. Very fast and very portable.

 
Also, the refurb route that carlfense mentioned is a great way to go. I've had a refurb Macbook pro for about 5 years and it's been an awesome machine.

 
Lyons: I can't even remember the last time I used an optic drive.

If you need more USB ports: connect an external USB port. If you need an optic drive: connect a USB optic drive. These are both things you will not need on-the-go. The beautiful hardware and extreme portability (1.5 lbs is nothing to scoff at!) make it worth it, IMO. These things fit in a manilla envelope. My Thinkpad T410 is a warrior, but it's a behemoth in comparison.

Although, you may be right that other ultra-thin laptops are narrowing the margin. I may be just too personally fascinated by these things. One of my friends has one, I like to touch it. Yep.

Lenovo Thinkpads are the continuation of IBM Thinkpads. As such, they have extremely good reputation. Not Lenovos in general, mind you: the Thinkpads. They will be priced more, and there are constant discounts on them. But, you will be getting what you pay for with those. The $600 to sub-$900 price range may put these out of reach, though. At that range, I think you may as well go with anything. They are equally bottom of the line and it'll just depend on what look & feel he is most comfortable with.

 
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zoogies-an optical drive is often needed for students to install software however. When you start to add a superdrive($79) and a usb hub($15-$30) plus the pain in the a$$ it is to carry that stuff around, is it really worth it?

SkerChicago-the cheapest air new actually starts at $949 for an 11 inch. $1149 for a 13 inch.

For $1099, you can get a standard 13 inch Macbook Pro. 500 GB of Harddrive compared to 128 GB with the 13 inch air. However, the pro is not solid state. I use both models everyday and in all honesty I can really tell that much of a difference.

The Pro comes standard with 2.5 GHz i5 processor, compared to a 1.7 GHz i5 with an Air. If you are willing to go up a model in the pro for the $1399 13 inch pro, that one comes with 750 GB HD as well as a 2.9 GHz i7 processor, which is very nice. As well as 8 GB of memory, whereas the basic pro and each of the Airs only come with 4 GB of memory.

A 13 inch Air is 2.9 lbs while the pro is 4.5 lbs. The pros have a standard battery life of 7 hours, while the Airs are about 5-6 hours.

What I am trying to get at is, get a pro. IMO, the possibility of having regret is much less than with the Air.

JJ, will your son be going to UNL? If so, I might be able to help you out even more, just need some ideas of what you would like.

If you are thinking PC, while I know everyone bags on dell, our store has a XPS 15z for $1299 that has awesome specs. Full HD screen, 1 TB HD, 8 GB of memory, i7 processor, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Its one of the nicer machines I have seen come through our store, and we recommend it most often for architecture majors, who usually require the most beastly machines. This machine is very thin as well.

Just some info for you to chew on, sorry for the massive post.

 
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Lyons in the Sea of Red. said:
zoogies-an optical drive is often needed for students to install software however. When you start to add a superdrive($79) and a usb hub($15-$30) plus the pain in the a$$ it is to carry that stuff around, is it really worth it?
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I agree with a lot of what you wrote but I would argue that you don't really need to carry the optical drive around. I don't remember ever installing software anywhere but my own dorm room/house/apartment. That's probably where I would leave my optical drive. 99.9% of the time you won't use it.

Again, I'd recommend going with a refurb. If you want the 13.3" Air you can get it for $929. (Or the 13.3" Pro for the same price.)

 
Lyons in the Sea of Red. said:
zoogies-an optical drive is often needed for students to install software however. When you start to add a superdrive($79) and a usb hub($15-$30) plus the pain in the a$$ it is to carry that stuff around, is it really worth it?
Click to expand...
It depends. All the software I've ever installed from school was delivered online. Actually, for one class we had the stuff come on a floppy disk!

You will also never need to carry that optical drive and usb hub around. Leave it in the room. (Oh, like carlfense just said :P )

 
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Lyons in the Sea of Red. said:
JJ, will your son be going to UNL? If so, I might be able to help you out even more, just need some ideas of what you would like.

If you are thinking PC, while I know everyone bags on dell, our store has a XPS 15z for $1299 that has awesome specs. Full HD screen, 1 TB HD, 8 GB of memory, i7 processor, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Its one of the nicer machines I have seen come through our store, and we recommend it most often for architecture majors, who usually require the most beastly machines. This machine is very thin as well.
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No, unfortunately he will be attending the University of Northern Colorado. Not really unfortunate I guess (except won't have another inside source for football tickets) but it will save us a fair amount of money (tuition, housing, and travel expense is much less for us at UNC) . He wanted to look at UNL but made up his mind otherwise before visiting.

I'm not sure I could ever purchase another Dell. I used to swear by them but got burned pretty bad on the last few machines from them. We have a Dell XPS tower at home and it's never impressed me. I won't even go into the Latitude laptop we got for work- what a POS.

 
Lenovo Thinkpad X230...done. Awesome keyboard, built like a tank, matte screen.

I wouldn't put too much stock in brands because there's only a couple companies that are contracted to build systems. Basically there's Apple doing their thing, professional lines (e.g. HP Elite, Lenovo Thinkpad), ultrabooks, and then lower end 15.6"-17" consumer models that are all slight variations of the same crap. You may get better somewhat better customer service with Dell, or no customer service with Acer, but the system itself won't be that much different.

Also I really don't get the fascination with the MacBook air. It's a nice system but a lot of $ for what you get. The ram is soldered onto the mobo, the sdd is soldered onto a daughter card...so you get bent over for a decent system out the gate and if those parts should happen to fail, to the dumpster it goes out of warranty. Totally ridiculous imo. Durability from what I've heard isn't that great either, so I really do wonder why so many students are throwing them in book bags. If you desperately want an ultrabook, models with the AMD Trinity APU are coming down the pipe for considerably less.

 
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