College laptop

Meglamonia

Looking to buy a laptop fairly shortly,something not too dear and that will suit college.My main uses will just be for internet usage,stuff like microsoft word for assignments etc ,music and a little gaming.Thanks

Dannysaurus

What games do you play? Do you intend to crank the graphics up to higher settings or do you not mind, as long as it gives playable framerates? The former WILL be rather dear.
What's your budget? Any preferences to brands?

Oh and, is it urgent?

I'll start you off with this config of the Dell XPS 15.

- Backlit keyboard, I think those are wonderful if you're working on an assignment in the dark
- the i7 2670QM would be sufficient, and it goes well with CPU intensive games like SC2 and LoL.
- Large enough HDD
- Nvidia GT540m, it'd do most of the current games well with med settings. In comparison, I had a laptop packing a GT330m. SC2 was grand enough at High, unless in rather large battles, and same goes for WoW. So the GT540m would handle that no problemo.
- The 95% Gamut screen provides amazing colours and screen quality (dare I say, even better than the ones of Macbook Pros) and the 1920x1080 resolution that comes with it is just wonderful when it comes to multi-tasking. Assignments-wise, with more do display on screen, I'm pretty sure it'll help.
- The battery life on this is pretty great, especially if you get the slightly ugly looking but kinda worth it larger battery. Almost 4 hours of DvD playback? Sweet.
- It's prettyful

The only downside is that the RAM leaves a lot to be desired, especially with the price that Dell offers to upgrade it. I'd say just buy a 4GB stick for less than 50 quid online, and replace one of the sticks on the laptop, essentially putting it at 6GB, that's pretty sufficient I'd say. Or you could get both sticks amounting to 8GB at less than the cost of the upgrade that Dell offers.
If you're willing to buy online, there's a good number of sites I could direct you to that might suit what you need without being TOO dear :L

Meglamonia

Thanks very much for the reply!The only game I'll be playing is football manager :pac: I think 600 would be the maximum I'd be willing to spend.

Tbh I have a thing against Dell since my last two laptops from them haven't been great and have always had problems with them.But other then Dell I don't mind really.Cheers

johneire31

Try PC World and see if you like anything there, they have a few good deals on now which fall into the affordable price range and have fairly good specs.

Almost anything will run MS Word and do internet so the remaining variable of gaming is the unknown factor. What gaming are you on about, if your looking for a fully gamed out Laptop then the spend a 1000 on the XPS above. Otherwise you in the affordable market of around 500 yo yo's.

Get something that makes sense. In college you don't want to be carrying around something that weighs a ton, you need great battery life.

Netbooks are an option as they are small, fit easy into any bag, can be got with 10hrs battery life, can Word, can Internet, but can't game. Walk through any campus and will see just how popular theses things are with students.

just do some research on it, you will find your needs fairly quick

j

Meglamonia

All I want really is a decent laptop that can multi task things like music,internet etc comfortably and that is able for college work.I don't think Football manger requires a high end graphics card anyway?Could be wrong there.Any recommendations?Thanks in advance.

Dannysaurus

Ok if it's only football manager... And yeah, above poster is right, gotta think a tad bittie practical. I can't really reccomend a specific laptop, but perhaps a ballpark of what you'll find handy:

- Firstly, having experienced things on both spectrums screen resolutions, look for anything larger than 1600x900 instead of the standard 1366x768. When it comes to multi-tasking, it's a wonderful thing to have. Look for comparisons on Google, you'll know what I mean.

- For gaming, I'd say go with any of the Sandy Bridge based processors, as their integrated graphics card would be able to support most games, albeit at lower settings. Though you can try looksie at notebookcheck.com to check performances of graphics cards, as most of the entry level graphics cards perform better than the integrated ones.

- Go with about 4GB of RAM. This can be easily upgrade able.

- Backlit keyboards are hard to find, but I'm sure you're gonna be in situations where it'll really come in handy, like working on an assignment at night.

With regards to the XPS 15, it's merely an entry level multimedia laptop. Gaming laptops on the other hand are gonna cost a bomb. I'd reccomend investing a bit more than 600, since it's something that you're gonna use for the next couple of years, so perhaps you could look at the Lenovo Y540 for example, or Vaio laptops. They most likely will push past the 600 budget, but maybe 200 tops.
It's gonna be worth it though.

freakystreak

Football Manger is a memory and processor hungry game. I'm looking for a cheap laptop too, around £300 and from what I've seen there are some good deals to be had. Unless you want all the bells and whistles of FM matches, then you can run it on a basic graphics card but if you want loads of leagues etc then you need a pretty powerful machine.

Hope that helps and good luck with the search.