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Solve : Need a laptop? |
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Answer» I'm heading off to university next year, so I need to buy a laptop for school. I'm looking for something that follows this:
I know you guys always get threads like these with little-to-no information, so I tried to provide as much as possible. Any help is appreciated. When I was in college and laptops were in the thousands of dollars I bought a Factory Refurb Toshiba Portege Pentium 3 600Mhz Laptop from Tiger Direct for $399.99 which was about 2 years old and like $1099 new. I had a minor problem with the acupointer drifting on it and they overnighted me a replacement in a box with lots of grey foam with INSTRUCTIONS on how to RETURN it without it costing me a cent with prepaid return label. The 2nd laptop I still have today 12 years later, although I rarely use it in favor of faster more modern laptops. If you have difficulties finding a new Core i5 Laptop that is within your budget, you can always check into Factory Certified Refurbs. My Toshiba that I got came with a 1 year warranty at the time and the accupointer acted up just slightly 9 months later. I placed phone call with Tiger Direct who then gave me Toshiba's contact info and I was then able to RMA it and get a replacement. Here is a Core i5 ASUS that matches your specs: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7371365&CatId=4936 Warranty on this is 3 months parts/labor. Maybe there are other brands out there with longer warranties or an extended warranty option. ASUS offers 3 months on refurbs and other brands might have longer warranties. As far as battery life goes for a Core i5 laptop, your probably looking at a maximum battery life of 3 to 4 hrs, and possibly lesser if running intensive programs even with power management set in the BIOS and OS to be conservative. If you could get by with a small netbook, you could get up to 9 hrs of use per charge such as my Toshiba Netbook 205B with Atom Dual-core CPU. But my netbook has a 10.1" screen, 3 USB ports, no optical drive unless I connect one to USB port as an external, and it originally came with a 160GB SATA hard drive and I upgraded to a OCZ 90GB SSD SATA hard drive to get faster performance and run on less power, but at 70GB less storage. I am thinking that if you have 2 classes that require this laptop to be in use for like an hour each you will probably be fine, but any more than that without docking your laptop to an outlet to power and recharge at the same time, it will die on you in the 3rd or 4th hour of use. A friend of mine bought an extra battery for his Pentium 4 laptop way back in college so he could swap batteries and be back up and running another 2 hrs. I realize that this thread is GETTING a little long in the tooth but if the O/P has YET to commit to a purchase a couple of points to consider. 1.Have a chat with the course directors and ask for input as to what needs to be emphasized in the purchase that would be optimum for the courses that you shall be taking. 2.Investigate if the University has an assistance program that allows students to purchase computers at reduced prices.Some do. truenorthAlso, use the laptop before you buy it. Make sure you like the KEYBOARD, touchpad, and display. |
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