Da Bomb Diggity: Best Buys for Back to School

[Narg]

All your points can be answered by simply this:

Do you want to spend 1 hour on an assignment or 30 mins.

Think about it...

Specifically, on video: If are you a archetictual student? You need more than on board video. That could be said for most student types, considering their field, chemistry, engineering, computer science, math graphing, design studies of any kind. There is a lot to be desired in video ability by modern education software and design software. Or, maybe after studies you want to see a movie? On board video handles that, but barely, very barely. Do it better. Get the right equipment for the job. Last, what if you want to upgrade to Windows Vista. On-board video won't handle that either. Upgrade or be left behind really quickly.

Also, batteries from Dell in my example are $99 for the bigger version. Many here have stated you don't always have a plug available as a student. Get the bigger one.

Hard drives: There's more to loading a file than just scraping the data off the hard drive. Higher drive speed helps the virus check, the program .dll loads as you open the file and a ton other functions. Hard drives are said to be the last main bottle neck in modern computers. Don't buy into oblivion and legacy equipment. If you can only afford one of these upgrades, get the faster hard drive. That's the biggest improvement you can make to a low cost system. Even sub-$500 desktop computers have 7200rpm hard drives today. Why be worse on a laptop?

Blue-Tooth? I guess you don't need the hard drive either, why not remove that too? Consider a lot of college students today will most likely use Yahoo's or MSN's new voice IM to talk to their parents and friends back home. (or Vonage, or whatever...) With blue-tooth you have an easy way to add a blue-tooth headset to make your conversation private. There are other uses for blue tooth also. Like cell phone network connectivity. You need blue-tooth. Period.

All I say is spend $300 more and you'll gain twice the computer. Money well spent. Not money wasted, like the $700 versions in the article. Spend only $700 now and you'll be buying another laptop before you college career is over and you have a degree. Spend the small extra now and you'll last the full degree program with your laptop.

 

[gm0n3y]

All your points can be answered by simply this:

Do you want to spend 1 hour on an assignment or 30 mins.

Think about it...

Specifically, on video: If are you a archetictual student? You need more than on board video. That could be said for most student types, considering their field, chemistry, engineering, computer science, math graphing, design studies of any kind. There is a lot to be desired in video ability by modern education software and design software. Or, maybe after studies you want to see a movie? On board video handles that, but barely, very barely. Do it better. Get the right equipment for the job.

Also, batteries from Dell in my example are $99 for the bigger version. Many here have stated you don't always have a plug available as a student. Get the bigger one.

Hard drives: There's more to loading a file than just scraping the data off the hard drive. 50% more speed helps the virus check, the program .dll loads as you open the file and a ton other functions. Hard drives are said to be the last main bottle neck in modern computers. Don't buy into oblivion and legacy equipment.

Blue-Tooth? I guess you don't need the hard drive either, why not remove that too? Consider a lot of college students today will most likely use Yahoo's or MSN's new voice IM to talk to their parents and friends back home. (or Vonage, or whatever...) With blue-tooth you have an easy way to add a blue-tooth headset to make your conversation private. There are other uses for blue tooth also. Like cell phone network connectivity. You need blue-tooth. Period.

All I say is spend $300 more and you'll gain twice the computer. Money well spent. Not money wasted, like the $700 versions in the article. Spend only $700 now and you'll be buying another laptop before you college career is over and you have a degree. Spend $300 extra now and you'll last the full degree.

I think you are overstating things a little bit. When I had my Thinkpad, it had 16MB shared graphics memory with an onboard chip. I was able to play many games like Warcraft 3, WoW, Lineage 2, etc with no problems (and this was 2 years ago). YOU DO NOT NEED A VIDEO CARD TO PLAY MOVIES, THAT IS CRAP! My onboard video was fine for playing movies. I watched many movies on my laptop often hooking it up to a TV at a friends house. As for educational video requirements, if you are doing any kind of 2D rendering including graphics, etc, you do not need a video card for that. I used many different programs while in school (taking comp sci) and not once did any of them tax my onboard video.

As for hard drives, if it is a small increase in cost, then I say go for it. but if it is going to cost your another $100 or more (additional 15% in cost) just to get a faster hard drive, then I would say forget it. So programs take a little longer to load, big deal. How much time do we really spend waiting for programs to load? Run your virus scan at night. You certainly wouldn't want to run it while on battery.

I think your bluetooth argument is a little biased. I use a laptop now that has bluetooth and I have a bluetooth phone and many of my friends cars have bluetooth and I have never used it and none of my friends use it in their cars. Yes it is useful to some people in certain instances and if you specifically want to use something that requires bluetooth, then by all means get bluetooth. I am just saying that to say that EVERYBODY needs it, regardless of situation is a bunch of crap. This is a budget machine, if you don't need it, don't get it.

I agree that if you have the option to get a better battery for cheap, go for it, its worth it.

Video card, hard drive speed, bluetooth are not reasons that the low budget student will feel the need to upgrade their laptop anytime soon. I seriously doubt that a student will say 1 year from now "man I wish my hard drive was faster, I'd better dump another $700 into a new laptop". Again, if any upgrade option is a small price, it is worth considering, or if the student is going to have a specific need (video, BT, storage space, etc) then by all means it is worth the upgrade cost. As for the unforseen, you can always go buy a better hard drive in the future if you need it, or a bluetooth card for that matter.

 

[Narg]

You are stuck in medocracy, right?

 

[gm0n3y]

Actually, I just use my laptop for work now, my home PC is much better. I am just thinking if I was a student, I would rather safe a couple hundred bucks and use it to buy beer

 

[Berzemus]

Actually, I just use my laptop for work now, my home PC is much better. I am just thinking if I was a student, I would rather safe a couple hundred bucks and use it to buy beer

That's a good point.. who's actually a student in here ?
I'm a law student, and perfectly able to say what kind of hardware you'd need for a particular job. Being a student, i know the key elements of a laptop "for students": portability, battery time, size, and ease of use. You don't need a "luggable" cray supercomputer.

If you really wouldn't bother about money, i'd recommand buying a macbook. But as students aren't famous for having loads of money (unless heavily sponsored by wealthy parents), even ~700€ is quite a sum.

Sure they could use bleuthooth, as wel as a RAID array (data safety!!), 19" screen (space!!), 20 batterys (10 hours unplugged!! on such a machine), two apple 30" cinema displays (more space!!) and a second laptop just in case the first one get's stolen, but pardon me for saying this, they could as well do without, and save money for other, more important things.

 

[d1gw33d]

I just purchased my first notebook last weekend (from newegg.)
Plenty of research was done and found it is damn near impossible to get a sub $700 laptop without too much sacrifice IMO.

If I absolutely had to keep it at 700, I think the Celeron M (400 series) were the best bang for the buck. You could usually find a Celeron M equiped system with 1GB / 60+GB HD / 15.4 WXGA & DVD-RW's around that price range (at least on newegg.)

I ended up going with the Lenovo 3000 N100 (Core Duo T2300E 1.66 / 512Mb / 15.4WXGA / 80GB HD / Intel GMA950) which is a Centrino Duo platform notebook. Battery life (with 6 cell) hovers around 4 hours. Out the door, I shelled out $974 but have a $100 mail in on the way. In the near future, I can easily shell out $50 for another 512MB of DDR2 667. I'm glad I made the purchase. Runs win apps almost as well as my FX-55 equiped desktop and haven't even gotten into any heavy use of the 2nd core.

Bottom line is, the extra $150-200 is well spent IMO if its at all possible for you to do so.

 

[Stardude82]

I disagree, the mobile celerons are a piece of crap and celerons in general have been pieces of crap for a long time. Slow with no speed steep.

As for the $500 toshiba, they only have like 2 at that price. Its all a ploy to get you into the store.

Secondly, the article's author seriously doesn't see HP and Compaq computers in stores. Where do the live? In LA, I regularly see sub-$500 (with no rebate needed) every where. These little Compaqs which only need a little more ram for them not to suck. So they are not core duo, but processors are entirely too fast anyways.