Deciding on College Laptop for performance for the money

Leopard 600p

Honorable
Jul 8, 2013
4
0
10,510
Hey Tom's community,

I am planning to buy a laptop for college based on the specifications they recommended. Normally, I would go with one of their laptops, but theirs have pretty bad reviews and I think there are better choices out there for the money. I have a budget between $1200 and $1400. I want a computer that's fast and can allow for some gaming (as I may not be taking my desktop), but I need a decent battery life, so if I must sacrifice some performance for battery life I will (1-3 hours won't cut it.)

Here's the link with their selection: http://www.clemson.edu/ccit/hardware/purchasing/laptop_specs_2015-2016.html

The relative specs of the above laptops (Do not really want to go below this):
- Intel dual-core i5-5200U
- 8 GB RAM
- 256GB Solid State Drive
- 1 TB Hard Drive (an SSD is nice, but I need a physical disk drive as well)

So that's pretty much it. I would love to look for better specs with my budget (1200-1400$). I truly do not want to go over this price, but if someone has an argument of why to put more in, I might consider it.

BTW I LOVE the specs of this laptop (ASUS ROG GL552VW-DH74): http://www.amazon.com/GL552VW-DH71-15-Inch-Discrete-GeForce-Metallic/dp/B01578ZKPO/ref=cm_rdp_product

BUT, the battery life is terrible (1.5-2.5 hours).

If someone can find the specs of the above laptop with decent battery life, or at least a laptop with my college's specs and having 1) good battery life 2) good school usage performance 3) some gaming capabilities, would be a great laptop for me as this is one of the most expensive purchases I've made for a computer and I will probably be using the same computer throughout college.

Thank you the community!

Leopard

*Also a big thanks to this community who've helped me out for years and have fueled my passion for computers, cheers to 2016




 
Solution
look at the dell xps 13. And you can find the university discount on dell's website towards the bottom too. Also if you buy the business version of the xps 13 they have different configurations available with mostly the same specs. But one big difference between the business model vs the home model no bloatware.

garrettk4

Honorable
May 31, 2012
19
0
10,570
look at the dell xps 13. And you can find the university discount on dell's website towards the bottom too. Also if you buy the business version of the xps 13 they have different configurations available with mostly the same specs. But one big difference between the business model vs the home model no bloatware.
 
Solution