The largest factor in purchasing a laptop for college use is often price. This is understandable, although there are many other factors to consider. Here are a few of my suggestions for good laptops for college students. 

Cheap laptops of many brands are available, but Toshiba Satellites have shown greater quality than the competitor’s in their price range. The Toshiba Satellite C650 is a good starting point in a good, but usable laptop. It has decent battery life, and is priced in the neighborhood of 400 dollars. The Toshiba Satellite laptops have a full numberpad on the keyboard, but this takes up space that might be better spent on other keys. It is still much easier to type on than a netbook, though.

For those that have the money, and want to get the top quality for it, the Macbook reigns as one of the best college laptops. While it costs nearly 1000 dollars, the Macbook has been praised as lightweight, easy to use, high quality, stylish, durable, and well worth the investment for anyone that has the money. Some people dislike the occasional quirks in, and general lack of games available for the Mac OS.

If price isn’t an issue, but needing a solid Windows platform is, the Lenovo Thinkpad may be perfect for you. The Thinkpad T series fall at around 900 dollars, but are well built, fast, and have a large array of options. Derived from the IBM Thinkpad, the Lenovo Thinkpad has one of the lowest failure rates of all laptops, helping to insure that you will have your laptop when you need it.

The most popular computer brand on the market is undoubtedly Hewlett Packard. HP offers cheap, medium quality laptops, which fall behind the Thinkpad in performance, behind the Macbook in style, and behind the Satellite in price. However, there is definitely something to be said for mediocrity. An HP Pavillion dv6 has the raw computer power of a Thinkpad or Macbook, but lacks the high price, exacting standards, and incredible feel. The Pavillion will set you back around 500 dollars, and has a higher failure rate than the Thinkpad and Macbook, but is generally is good choice for a normal college student.

For portability, there are expensive ultraportables from the Sony Vaio to the Macbook Air that cram the power of a larger laptop into just a few pound, but the high price precludes these from the college laptop market. Netbooks are a viable way to go if you are always on the go. The MSI Wind is one of the better choices of netbooks. At around 300 dollars, the Wind is small, light, and cheap, while managing to stay on battery for longer than the average netbook today. Like all netbooks, though, the light weight ans low price come at the cost of a higher failure rate, and a miniscule keyboard. If you go this route, definitely find a netbook that you can type on for a while to insure it doesn’t drive you insane.

Ultimately, there is no single best college laptop. The choice you ought to make depends on how much you’re willing to pay, whether you value style in addition to function, and what you need from your laptop. The best laptop you can have is the one that matches you best.

If you can’t make up your mind, and just need something to type papers on, side with the Toshiba. If you’re into gaming, get a Thinkpad with a discrete graphics card. If you want something that will simply work, go with the Macbook. The Wind can be carried with you easily. The Pavillion is a good bet if you don’t really know what you want, or if you want a little bit of everything.

Being in college is tough; I’ve done it, and I remember the years of living off of Ramen noodles trying to keep my bank account out of the red. Being able to go off and find a solid, high performance laptop while you’re in college is almost an impossibility. That said, you don’t always have to suffer. You can still find great deals on laptops that will get you through all of your school work, and yes, even play a few games! Today we’re going to go through a couple of those to give you a good idea of what’s affordable on a college budget.

First of all, you might want to look at factory refurbished laptops before you look at the newer models. The savings on refurbished models are often quite surprising to people who haven’t given any thought to buying reconditioned instead of new. So, let’s get started.

The first laptop that comes highly recommended for college students is the Acer Aspire One AO531H. Acer is a company that specializes in low-cost (but high quality) laptops, specifically for those who may be on a budget. For those looking to do homework or other tasks that don’t require much processing power, this is a great little netbook. It has a 10.1 inch screen, which is just about the right size when you need to haul this computer back and forth from your dorm room to your classes. It’ll easily fit in a backpack, so that’s not a worry at all. Even better is that it only weighs 2.5 pounds, which is considerably less than most laptops. You can snicker at all the people lugging around their huge 17 inch laptops!

This Acer has a very respectable 1.60 GHz Intel Atom processor and 1 GB of RAM, making it plenty powerful enough for just about every application you’d ever need. High end games might be a bit of an issue, but remember that we’re talking about keeping you on a budget! This laptop also boasts a very nice 160 GB worth of hard drive space, which is better than most laptops its size. How much does the Aspire One cost? A bit less than $300 refurbished, and just under $400 brand new. Either way, it’s a steal!

Speaking of the best college laptops, you’ll love this next one: The HP Pavilion DV7-1464NR is really a performance laptop with a small price tag. This thing will play all of your games and more; it even includes a Blu-Ray player standard. It has a 17.0 inch screen with a 1440 x 900 resolution, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM straight from the factory (expandable up to 8 GB!), and a 500 GB hard drive. It also has a 2.2 GHz AMD Dual-Core processor, making it one of the more powerful laptops on the market. How much is this going to run you? About $700 refurbished. If you want to go new you’ll pay about $1300 out the door, so I highly recommend the former. $700 is still a fair amount of money for a college student, but if you can get your family to help you out you’ll be all set!

Thanks for reading, everyone! I certainly hope that this post has given you a head start on choosing one of the best college laptops available to you today.

Brent is the author of http://www.refurbishedlaptopsguide.com.