Wanting a laptop for College, suggestions?

[Seramore]

I'm going to be attending classes soon, and I'm going to want to have a laptop for when I do. I'm aiming for something that's under $500, or even $300 if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm thinking of trying to find a cheap Macbook, but I'm open for other suggestions. I will be attending a community college for 2 years and then will be transfering to a University, so I'm looking for something that will last a while.

[bendak]

I am assuming you aren't going to be gaming on it, cause you won't be able to that well at this price range.

What about size? if you are carrying it around a lot, an Ultraportable (11-13 inch range) would be best. You'll also want something with good battery life.

Take a look at the HP dm1z. It's 11.6in, solid performance and good battery life (up to 10 hours but more like 5-6 hours under normal conditions). Engadget review: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/h...fusion-review/

These start at 379 and go up from there depending on the specs.

[Fhi]

I think the first things you want to figure out the screensize (make sure you try them out and see if you like the screensize) and weight - for college these are the two most important criteria. The rest should then be decided by your budget.

[Crispy]

Focus on the battery life, screen size and weight/durability. The tasks you have to peform for college can be done by pretty much anything, so the other specs are less relevant than the aforementioned ones.

Really just try some out, it's very personal what you like.

[vesseblah]

Wih that price point you should be looking into high end netbooks or low end AMD Llano based laptops. Will have long battery life and decent for schoolwork but hopeless for any kind of gaming.

If you want to do 25-man raiding on laptop, price range starts from about $800 and goes up from there, and those laptops will have pretty bad battery life.

[Deleted]

I got myself an Asus T101MT for uni. Best purchase EVER!
It now serves as notebooks, regular books, surfing machine. Basically everything that Isn't gaming, not to mention that since its a hybrid between an EEPC and a tablet it is amazingly smooth to use, with handwriting recognition(that works really well), a stable none laggy touch screen that you can configure to only recognize the pen you get with the laptop and not your hand(making writing on the screen really simple and easy) and most importantly it weights nothing and is small and tidy with a decent battery life.

[Tripl]

If you can think out of the box: the Asus Transformer (even though you might want to wait for the Transformer Prime to be released, it being so much more powerfull)
It comes with an inbuild (and frequently updated) office app that works perfectly fine with MS' Office suites, it is lightning fast and responsive and the best thing: it does 16 hours on one battery (taking that you have it docked in its keyboard, since, well, without the keyboard it wouldn't be much good for college / uni anyway.)

I bought it last summer, after not being able to keep up with my professors' speed of talking, and i've grown very fond of it. Esp. the fact that others around me with windows/mac latops have to charge frequently, while I can leave home early in the morning, and still do soe games on the bus back home in the evening on the same device.

The keyboard is very decent and user friendly (a bit wider then the average netbooks) and the screen is very vivid.