Best College Laptops: Tested Picks for Research, Writing, Gaming and More

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Bad list.

In college you want something light, good battery life, a good adjustable screen, decent keyboard, and fairly rugged. Those are paramount. Gaming is a far distant concern. A lot of corporate laptops fit this bill

A big bulky low battery life Nitro 5 is horrible. You'll look really dense sitting in a classroom with that thing and its huge power brick. Which means it'll sit in the dorm.

The Surface would be perfect, but that's a $1500+ laptop there. You probably should have set a price limit of $800 or so.

The XPS, beyond being expensive, again you picked a 15" model. Do you guys imagine a bunch of students in class with 15" screens on their 12" wide flip up tables? I mean yes, get a 27" 1440p IPS monitor for the dorm, the laptop needs to be usable in class.

The Mac would be the perfect form factor with a great screen and solid construction, but unless you are going for a media related degree like graphic design or some such, it is a no go. Too much requires Windows software. It's also expensive.

There are plenty of options out there but this list is trash.
 
Mac may be out of the budget of many college students. I have both PC and Mac laptops. The PC laptop is necessary for PC-specific applications. In my work, I need MS Visio. The Mac substitutes do not work for me as well. I love the Mac for its intuitive layout.
On the PC side, I like the HP laptops. I have a Z Book 17 (not the best for lugging around, however it has a top notch discrete graphics card and 32 gb of RAM. I have a smaller HP for portability's sake. The elite book is small and fairly powerful.
The best considerations need to be:
  1. What software do I need to run?
  2. How portable do I need it to be?
  3. What kind of battery life do I need?

There are great choices that fit the spectrum.
 
shady28 said:
Bad list.

In college you want something light, good battery life, a good adjustable screen, decent keyboard, and fairly rugged. Those are paramount. Gaming is a far distant concern. A lot of corporate laptops fit this bill

A big bulky low battery life Nitro 5 is horrible. You'll look really dense sitting in a classroom with that thing and its huge power brick. Which means it'll sit in the dorm.

The Surface would be perfect, but that's a $1500+ laptop there. You probably should have set a price limit of $800 or so.

The XPS, beyond being expensive, again you picked a 15" model. Do you guys imagine a bunch of students in class with 15" screens on their 12" wide flip up tables? I mean yes, get a 27" 1440p IPS monitor for the dorm, the laptop needs to be usable in class.

The Mac would be the perfect form factor with a great screen and solid construction, but unless you are going for a media related degree like graphic design or some such, it is a no go. Too much requires Windows software. It's also expensive.

There are plenty of options out there but this list is trash.
Click to expand...
I have some client that are student and need the 15" workstation like the W520 and W530 for cad rendering, video editing and such. I feel sorry for them lugging that beast arond , but the Dell equivilant weighs almost twice as much. But they are still cheaper than the a fraction of what these sell for.
 
My son loves the hp ultrabook. AMD powered and only was $600

I would never buy the intel part. Lol. They run super hot. They are also inefficient. I’ll be sticking with AMD

These articles are generally terrible
 
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