Laptop Suggestions for a College Student

HP has never let me down whenever ive used it.

 

http://h40059.www4.hp.com/uk/homelaptops/product.php?id=WA153EA&experience=direct

I have one of these, and it's pretty damn good. And relatively cheap, too.

 

They're more on the expensive side, but I would suggest a IBM Lenovo laptop/think pad. You can customize everything with them. My whole family has one of their own and they're very reliable, fast, and easy to use.

 

What are you going to be using it for? Are you going to be playing any games on it, doing any video editing, rending 3D animations, programming, or are you just going to use it for Internet and Word? Does it need to be a laptop, maybe a netbook would suffice, if you're not going to be using it all the time?

If you want the best price for performance, go with ASUS. If you want to spend your money on a brand name (or do video stuff, I suppose), go with Apple. If you want something sturdy and well-built (from what I've heard), go with Lenovo. If you want shitty support, go with Dell. My girlfriend's quite happy with her Samsung, actually - she's in a digital arts program and uses various Adobe products. If you want a gaming beast, go with Alienware.

 

Dusan made a great post regarding a good overall laptop. It can game and it has Win7. It's powerful, and efficent and plenty of space. The downside is likely battery. "Safe" is the user-end (Get it? Harr). There is plenty of software that'll help you.

But in all honesty, and as much as i would hate to say, but Apple has some impressive laptops.

Their all safe, efficent, long-lasting, powerful (In a sense), and great all-around laptops. This is espcially the case if your going to use Media-intense software (Like music programs, video editing, etc)

The Macbook is great and will last you the years you will be at berkeley (Congratz btw. So lucky. Beautiful place).
The Macbook Pro (I'd say go with the 15" version) Is just a better version / upgrade from the first.

But I wouldnt cross out Dusan's choice.

If your just looking for a good laptop to type essays, research and use it around campus (Mind you, not to play too many games that are latest and greatest)
The HP G60 is a good choice.

You can customize it and You can get a pretty good deal from the website for around 550 or less than 500. Which is nice, because you still get all the good stuff.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s.../psg/notebooks/Everyday_computing/G60t_series

 

Pavillion series usually have pretty good batteries too. My battery lasts more than three and a half hours in Power Saver mode, and a little less that two hours in High Performance mode.

And Apple laptops are good, but they are extremely overpriced. Seriously.

 

I find every HP computer I use likes to freeze every 15 minutes. I would recommend the Pavillion series as well

 

I'm not sure if you can even find laptops that bad anymore

 

My current laptop, a Compaq Presario, definitely fits your specifications and i got mine for only 500 dollars

 

How much battery does the Macbook have? My Lenovo has at least 5 hours and it's a fantastic work computer.

 

Can I just quickly ask, which type Windows or Apple?

 

You could definitely find something to meet your needs for much cheaper than that...

 

I was waiting for someone to suggest a Mac.

Yes, you can find a computer that's cheaper to match your needs but who knows how long it will LAST to match those needs. I was gifted my Macbook as a graduation gift in 2008 and here I am in 2010 still going strong with it. This is the only computer I can say I've had for this period of time with literally NO issues. It's a great computer for music, image editing and office type work.

 

From my experience PC's last for a pretty long time. Hell, I still have an old Pentium 3 sitting around somewhere that still does everything that I need it to do, really. It'll play the light games I play, it'll do photo-editing, word processing, IMing, You tube etc. and it only has less than 500 MB of ram. It's kind of slow but I'd be using it right now if it had a wireless card in it instead of my dads laptop which I'll have to return to him at some point.

 

That's only 2 years, big deal. I bought my ASUS laptop 2 years ago also, and it's still going very strong - it could last me another 5 years at least, and still be going strong. Of course, it'd be out of date by then, but so would the overpriced Macbook.

I have an old Dell laptop that's at least 7 years old that's still alive. Horribly spec'd now (again, 7 years ago, it had great specs for the time), but it still works just as fine as it's overpriced Mac counterpart. Your argument is moot.