Best college laptop?

[drewbrooks]

Hey guys, I'm going off to college this fall as a computer science major. I asked around a bit and it became obvious that I will need a laptop for the upcoming year. I haven't put all that much research into laptops, so this will be a boost for me. I'll also need something that I can game on. I currently use a pc that I built about 2 years ago, which is still going strong. If anyone has been in my position before, what would you suggest, and what are the type of features that I should prefer for my search?

 

[gskill support]

Depends on your budget.. but a decent gaming laptop would have an i5 CPU, dedicated 2GB graphics, SSD is a plus, and LCD 1080p. A system like this is roughly about $700-800 at this time for a nice deal.

Specification wise, it is a MacBook Pro on steroids, for quite a bit less in price.

 

[jaguarskx]

I recommend the following 15.6" Toshiba laptop from the Microsoft Store which is currently on sale for $449 (without Office 365). It has a Core i5-5200u CPU, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive and 1920x1080 resolution touchscreen. It is not too heavy at 4.5lbs as well.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Toshiba-Satellite-S55t-B5152-Signature-Edition-Laptop/productID.314413400

The 1080p screen allows for more information to be displayed on the screen compared to a 1366x768 resolution screen. The resolution allows you to devote half the screen to a word processing program to type papers while the other half can be used to surf the web if you need to do research.

OpenOffice is a free productivity software (like MS Office) which you can use to write papers with.

https://www.openoffice.org/

 

[jaguarskx]

Forgot to mention...

Laptops sold from the Microsoft Store are "Signature Edition Laptops" which means they are guaranteed not to have any bloatware installed.