Best College Laptops

Review: HP College Laptops

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HP laptops present a variety of options and features which will enable a college student to enjoy anything from just accessing the e-mail and browsing the internet to full scale gaming and entertainment. We’ll review three different HP laptops for college in this post, one for each budget.

An excellent entry level HP net book or mini notebook features a small profile, economic (also known as green) performance and a price tag that will fit nearly any budget. Starting at $279.99 the HP Mini Series 110 features a 10 inch screen, 9.5 hours of battery performance and a powerful 1.66GHz processor – extreme speed compared to desktops of just a few years ago. This little package also comes with a multi card 5 – in – 1 digital media card reader, three USB Ports and an integrated webcam, speakers and microphone, Wireless-N and optional mobile Broadband technology to round out the package. These tiny packages carry as much power as many desktops but in a small, efficient and fast package. You can expect a minimum of three hours of hard use – or much longer if you do have a lot of writing to or reading from the internal 160 GB hard drive. Use it when you are out shopping or on the go and no need to worry about carrying around a bunch of wires. In for a little more power and more features, you will have to give up a bit of the green incentive offered by the mini.

You can step into a midrange, the HP G#2t (G62t, G42t and G72t) series offers all of what the mini has with a larger display and keyboard (15 inch), extra memory, a hard drive twice as large and a dual core processor for more speed. What you gain in speed you give up in battery life. With a battery of equal size, you will only have about five hours of fully mobile use, less if you are using the hard drive or DVD Drive a lot. Prices for this model range between $479.99 and $599.99 with a variety of optional equipment including more memory, faster processor and high speed rewritable DVD. There are a number of midrange units to choose from with a little more power and features.

Achieving the powerhouse notebook in the HP line-up is the Envy. Its name is everything it means. This laptop has a power house of features including 4 GB of memory, an Intel i3-370 Dual Core 2.4GHz processor. This unit is powerful enough to take a run circles around the average desktop making it one of the best laptops for students. The 14 inch display is standard and if you want to play big screen, an optional HDMI interface can be added in the customization. Solid state hard drives make the system even more efficient and all top end systems have the 8-cell Lithium Ion Battery for extended wireless use. Prices in this range start $999.99 and can exceed $3000.00 with all the available upgrades.

The savvy buyer can obtain any of these portable devices direct from HP but I would recommend you do your homework and search for notebooks on sale where you can easily cut 20% or more off the higher end units and possibly find a lot of other models to choose from – there are best college laptops out there for nearly every need and wallet.

Good College Laptops: Dell

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Nowadays, it’s practically a requirement for college students to have their own laptops. With more and more professors uploading their lectures and schedules online, having instant access to a computer and the Internet is a must. However, with the proliferation of so many brands with so many models, it’s quite tricky to pick THE best laptops for college students. The first thing to keep in mind when choosing one though, is the brand. Is it known for having a durable, user-friendly, and feature-rich laptop range? Does it offer excellent after-sales service? Only a couple of brands do offer these, and one of them is Dell.

Dell laptops have long established a reputation for quality and excellence. Better yet, most of their laptops are quite affordable and therefore in the perfect price-range for the cash-strapped college student. To prove this, let’s compare 3 laptop for college in Dell’s lineup.

First is the Dell Inspiron i14R-2265MRB. At an average retail price of $750, it’s a bit on the pricey side for a college laptop. On the other hand, its features make the price worth it. It offers a 14” 1366 x 768 TFT display, 4GB of RAM, 500GB storage, a DVD+/-RW optical drive, and comes with an Intel Core i5 450M 2.66 GHz processor. The battery also lasts for around 5 hours, so students won’t need to scramble around and look for a socket after every class.

The second model is the Dell Vostro 3300. This laptop can be bought for around $600, hitting the sweet spot in the wallets of college students. The features aren’t too shabby either. It’s 13” screen makes it a bit lighter than the previous model, but the battery life is less stellar then the former. However, it also doesn’t scrimp on speed and storage as it offers 3GB of RAM and 320GB of storage. Moreover, it also comes with a 2.26 GHz Intel Core i5 M430 processor. Not bad at all.

Last but not the least is the Dell Inspiron Mini iM1012-687OBK. This is the cheapest among all the 3 models as it’s really more netbook than notebook. But then, netbooks are usually more suitable for students as their primary functions are for typing and surfing anyway. The Inspiron Mini’s excellent battery life is also guaranteed to make the young and active student very happy as it can go for around 9 hours before the next charge! The 10.1” WSVGA display offers clear and sharp images and the 1GB RAM and 160GB storage meets the standard among netbooks. At $280, this computer is a pretty sweet deal.

So there you have it, 3 examples of laptops that are part of Dell’s product line. These 3 uphold Dell’s reputation of producing laptops that are value for your money, and they’re affordable to boot! Another plus is that Dell offers excellent student discounts at the website Dell University. With lots of brands to choose from today, it might be worth it to check out Dell’s offerings first as they’ve proven time and again that they offer good college laptops at student-friendly prices!