Since my desktop sucks and I'm off to college soon, I thought that I might as well get a decent laptop that will last me through the next six years or so. While my budget isn't strictly limited, I'd like to at least get a somewhat high-performing computer for less than $2000 (with a non-stupid battery life if possible). So far, I've looked at a bunch of choices and can't quite decide on what I should pick; for some reason, none of them really seemed like what I wanted.

The few main things that I'd like, in descending order of importance:

• Processor with Sandy Bridge
  
• Decent graphics card
  
• 7200rpm HDD or hybrid drive
  
• At least 4GB DDR3 RAM
  
• Non-shit battery life
  
• As little bloatware contributing to the base config cost as necessary
  

What I've been looking at:
(*note: I just regex'd the end specs into BBCode format, a lot of the things on here are junk. The core specs are what I really care about.)

Maingear ex-L 15

• Primary Display: 15.6" HD+ 16:9 LED Display (1920x1080) (Included)
  
• Chassis: eX-L 15 Performance Chassis With Matte Black Finish (Included)
  
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 2720QM 2.2GHz/3.3GHz Turbo 8MB L3 Cache GT2 $217.00
  
• Graphics and GPGPU Accelerator: NVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 460m 1.5GB GDDR5 with Matte Finish Screen (Included)
  
• Memory: 8GB Kingston DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM (Dual Channel) $73.00
  
• Hard Drive Bay One: 500GB Seagate Momentus XT 7200rpm Hybrid SSD Hard Drive 2.5" SATA $88.75
  
• Memory Card Reader: All-in-One Integrated USB 2.0 Flash Card Reader & Writer (Included)
  
• Optical Drive One: 8X DVD Dual Layer Burner (Included)
  
• Network Adapter: On-board Gigabit Ethernet (Included)
  
• Wireless Network Adapter: Integrated 802.11b/g/n Wireless - up to 300Mbps! (Included)
  
• Audio: Integrated High Definition Audio (Included)
  
• Bluetooth: Integrated Bluetooth Technology Module (Included)
  
• Web Cam: Integrated 2.0MP Webcam (Included)
  
• Primary Battery: Removeable Li-Polymer battery pack 3800mAh, 42.18Wh (Included)
  
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (Included)
  
• Angelic Service Warranty: Lifetime Angelic Service Labor and Phone Support with 1 Year Hardware Warranty (Included)
  
• Advanced Warranty: 30-day ZERO dead pixel guarantee (Included)
  
• Product Subtotal: $1,955.75

HP ENVY 17

• Operating system: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  
• Processor: 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM (2.0 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 2.9 GHz
  
• Graphics card: 1GB GDDR5 Radeon(TM) HD 6850M Graphics [HDMI]
  
• Memory: 8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
  
• Hard drive: 1.5TB 5400RPM Dual Hard Drive (750GB x 2) with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
  
• Office software: No Additional Office Software
  
• Primary battery: One 6-Cell and One 9-Cell Lithium Ion Battery
  
• Display: 17.3" diagonal Full HD HP Ultra BrightView Infinity LED Display (1920x1080)
  
• Primary optical drive: Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
  
• Personalization: HP TrueVision HD Webcam
  
• Networking: Intel 802.11a/b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth(R)
  
• Keyboard: Backlit Keyboard
  
• Included Software Bundle: Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) Elements 9 & Adobe Premiere(R) Elements 9
  
• Price: $2,014.99

DELL XPS 17

• Operating System: Genuine Windows® Home Premium, 64-Bit, English
  
• Processor: 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2720QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.30 GHz
  
• Memory: 8GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 Memory
  
• Keyboard: Standard Keyboard - English
  
• LCD: 17.3" HD+ (900p) LED Display with 2.0MP HD Webcam
  
• Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M 3GB graphics with Optimus
  
• Hard Drive: 1.0TB 500GB 7.2k HDD x 2
  
• Color: Elemental Silver Aluminum
  
• Integrated Network Adapter: Integrated 10/100/1000 Network Card
  
• Adobe Reader: Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 9
  
• CD ROM/DVD ROM: Tray Load Blu-ray Disc BD-Combo (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
  
• Sound: JBL 2.1 Speakers with Waves Maxx Audio 3
  
• Wireless Plus Bluetooth: Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000
  
• Office Productivity Software (Pre-Installed): Microsoft® Office Starter:[/b] reduced-functionality Word & Excel w/ ads. No PowerPoint or Outlook
  
• Anti-Virus/Security Suite (Pre-installed): McAfee Security Center with VirusScan, Firewall, Spyware Removal, 30-Day Trial
  
• Battery: 92 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
  
• Hardware Support Services: 1 Year Basic Service Plan
  
• Data Safe: DataSafe 2.0 Online Backup 2GB for 1 year
  
• Mobile Broadband: No Mobile Broad Band Selected
  
• Sub Total $1,329.99

I could also get a Lenovo Thinkpad or a Sony VAIO, but I don't quite know for sure if I'd be getting a good deal for the costs. Right now, it looks like the dell XPS is probably my best choice, but I was wondering if you fellow SENers had better recommendations for a college laptop that'll last me through the next six years. If you do, don't hesitate to post them: I would greatly appreciate the help and + karma your post. Thanks in advance!

I'll be honest. I'm sure you'll probably want to game, but laptops tend to take a beating once you go on campus, and it isn't typically anyone's fault. It could be simply from accidentally banging your bag into a chair too many times. Unless you're planning on leaving your laptop in your dorm (honestly I've been using my laptop for note taking for the past couple years), I wouldn't spend more than $600 or so bucks, and I'd get a mid-line that you could find from a company like Acer or Asus or as much as I hate to say it Dell. For the record, I'm never buying a Dell again, but at least I wasn't too heartbroken when it became a piece of crap. Not to mention, bulky computers are a pain to carry around should you have to carry around texts (granted, my heaviest textbook is this guy) and anything else it'll add up.

Gotta agree. To me it also seems more useful to have a tablet or small laptop for classes and a more powerful secondary computer (laptop or desktop) that remains more or less stationary (except maybe carrying it home on the weekends). The problem is decent portability and battery life pretty much excludes gaming "handling", performance and a nicely sized screen. Maybe you can find a compromise but it won't excel in either fields and you end up being disappointed by your expensive purchase.

Yep, that's what I do. I have a c£200 netbook for being on the move because it fits into a small bag, I can take notes on it and it still does all basic tasks well.

I also have a desktop I've constantly upgraded over time. Current components probably cost £500 total or less, and it runs pretty much all games of recent years at more or less max settings with playable framerates. In the US it would obviously be cheaper as well.

I third the idea of having a cheap POS to lug around to lectures with you, and a decent gaming rig sitting in your room at all times. Not only is it more convenient (and you're less liable to get your expensive laptop investment stolen), it's also probably cheaper overall.

Is it not possible to upgrade your existing desktop or at least cannibalise some of the components in a new machine (monitor, speakers etc.)?

For $2000, it's not difficult to get a laptop that you can both play games on and do work. I went for the "everything" option and got a Vaio Z - for ~$2000 I got a i5 processor, 330M GPU (enough to play SCII well), 1600x900 resolution (with 1920x1080 option), and SSD's in RAID0 (extremely fast drive). It weighed three pounds and had a 13.1" screen, a fantastic, backlit keyboard, an option to switch between the discrete and integrated GPU, a webcam and a fingerprint reader. Battery life was ~3.5 hours in the beginning, but I haven't conserved it well and it's down to two hours within a year. A year ago, it was a fantastic laptop, and it still is. I'm honestly still in love with it ten months after getting it, which I think is pretty amazing. I'm definitely not disappointed by my expensive purchase, as NudeRaider put it - I can have all of my documents on one extremely fast laptop that can handle anything I throw at it which is yet small and light enough to be extremely portable. You quickly acclimatize to a small screen, and gaming on it is no problem (I can even play SCII on a trackpad now; learned when my mouse broke).

Sony recently released the new Vaio S series, which is like the old Z series except that it comes with Sandy Bridge, better GPU, and standard HDD options (along with SSD's in RAID0 options). It's also 13.3", and the only reason I don't like it is because they removed higher resolution models - you're stuck with 1366x768. This, however, isn't the new replacement for the Z, but rather a more intermediate model. I read that they'll have the "Sony SA", which is supposed to be the official replacement for the Z - but if you can live with 1366x768, this is still a very good choice. Additionally, they have a nice thing called a "sheet battery" for ~$100, which you can attach to the bottom of your laptop to double battery life. I believe the official estimates were 7 hours without sheet battery and 15 with, and if you cut that in half (to make it realistic), it sounds pretty good. It's supposed to weigh ~4 pounds without the sheet battery, probably due to the non-SSD hard drive. The one problem I've had is that the sound quality is subpar; the speakers are worse than those on my brother's iPad.

I'm not very interested in large laptops; mostly those in the 12"-14" range. If you don't care that much about portability... well, the HP Envy 17 should be good. I've heard that the Dell XPS models are ugly as hell, and HP... well, isn't. Maybe take a look at the Envy line in a local Best Buy or something? I also believe the Envy line is supposed to have superb sound quality.

Also, I would recommend looking at SSD's for your laptop. They greatly improve speed, and... well, after some traveling, the external HDD I use for backups is broken, but the drive in my laptop's doing fine. You can get an external hard drive for ~$100 to store everything, and ~192GB should be enough for all of your music/games (unless you have WoW, Dragon Age, SCII, and ten other huge games on there).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 3 2011, 4:29 pm by Centreri.

Coming from someone who got a ~$2500 laptop for gaming freshman year:

Get a cheap laptop and keep it purely work related. Then get an upgradable gaming desktop. You'll save money and have two computers.

Unless you're planning on LAN'ing every weekend, it's not worth the hassle and in two years you won't be able to play most games without lag. Overheating is also a serious issue, even on a chillpad.

I think you just need to choose your laptop better. ;o . Overheating has never been a problem for mine, though I've heard that the Alienware 11" one has that problem. I would expect that larger laptops would be even better at managing temperature.

The thing with having two computers - it's better to have one. All your documents and work on one machine. If it can handle the jobs of both, why have two?

Of the dozen-or-so people I've met that have bought an Alienware, there is only one guy who stands by his. And that's a tiny one.

This is SEN, I am Ex, and this is my department. And I am telling you to listen to the others in this thread when they say: Get a netbook or cheap smaller laptop for notes and travel, have a desktop in your dorm for actual gaming and work. There is (nearly) no way you're going to get what you want and be happy long term. People have made the mistake you're about to, heed their warning. If you decided to listen to reason I'll gladly help you pick out your laptop and design your desktop.

If you decide to go with what everyone else said, make sure that you're going to have the room for a desktop. My dorms are very small, and sticking a huge desktop there would've been a problem.

Yes- all your work is on one, all of your not-work is on the other. It makes it easier to sit down and focus on school-related things, too, which is nice.

With dropbox, that's not even a real reason anymore anyway.

Dropbox has a limit. Depending on the major, that could be a problem. Additionally, programs like solidworks, photoshop, etc that work better on better computers could be a problem on netbooks. It's more of a hassle having to deal with these things rather than sticking to one laptop.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Apr 3 2011, 10:05 pm by Centreri.

Or flashdrive.

Consider commute and how far you travel somewhere as well. If you have any classes that will require you to run semi-demanding software, you won't be able to run it on netbooks. And if you go on a vacation somewhere and find yourself with nothing to do, you won't be able to play a match of SCII.

I'll just chime in with the others.

Buying a laptop now, and expecting it to last you 6 years and play games, is a nonsense. The market has changed quite a bit from 5 years ago - pretty much all the entry-level laptops in the $600-1000 range will do any basic office productivity that you need, so you don't need to buy a mid or high-end laptop just to get something that is reasonably fast and responsive.

If you want to game, you'd be better off buying a cheap laptop and a console. Obviously a console isn't a PC, but it'll be a lot cheaper, and at university you're more likely to want to play social games with friends etc (then again, all your friends may have consoles anyway).

If you are going to splash out for anything on a laptop, I'd recommend an SSD.

I don't think he said six years. I'm planning on switching mine in maybe two more years, when it's three; if it ages better than I expect it to, I'll wait more before getting a new one.

If you stick with your "big powerful laptop" thing (as opposed to "netbook + desktop" or "small powerful laptop"), take a look at Sony Vaio as well. I don't believe them to be overpriced; they seem to sometimes go into weird niches that other makers avoid and are then errantly compared (Like Vaio Z and MBA). I just checked a few of the newer models - apart from the tiny S, there's the 14" C (like an S, but can come with 1600x900) and 15.5" C (like a 14" C, but can come with 1920x1080), and the new 16" F, which comes with a 1920x1080 3D screen (a gimmick, but doesn't seem overpriced), SB i7 processor choices, 540M graphics (find comparisons with the Envy/Dell's GPU yourself, I don't know if it's better or worse). Unfortunately, it's high starting price of $1600 would put 256GB SSD's, the only SSD option, out of your price range - but if you're going for a regular hard drive anyway, as you are in your self-selected builds, that's no problem. And, any laptop you choose to buy, read all the reviews you can get your hands on. I would expect the bigger Vaio's to have better speakers, but if they suck as badly as mine do, it will be in the reviews (I knew, I just didn't really care, I use headphones not to annoy roommate anyway). All of the problems will be in the reviews.

Additionally, I'd like to point out that looking through the cheaper Vaios (S and C), I noticed that your builds seem very overpriced. You don't need 8GB RAM; There was only one time where I felt that 4GB wasn't enough, and all I did was close chrome and turn back to SCII. 6GB should be fine. You don't need the most expensive processor; my non-SB low-end i5 handles everything swimmingly. I'm averaging ~5% use right now, with 10 Chrome windows, Zune, Skype, Pidgin, Onenote, and 120 other misc. processes. Sandy Bridge is nice, but you won't get much more out of an i7 unless you know you'll need it for your schoolwork.

.... Oh.

Yeah, not going to happen. Buy a $1000 laptop today and another one in three years. Vaio C series will do. Maybe a smaller HP Envy. Something with ~15". It seems to be where laptops are cheapest (discounting netbooks).

I missed the 6-years thing, too.

My laptop is pretty decent for what I need to do, and it only cost $350. I don't play games on it, but I figure that since I'm in college I shouldn't be focusing on those anyways.

6-year thing was the first thing I noticed. Definitely not gonna happen. Completely unrealistic. The day your laptop arrives and you open the box its obsolete.

I also tried the powerful-laptop-instead-of-shitty-laptop+good desktop-route. If laptops didnt have so many freaking problems, it would've been worth it, but right now I'd rather have a shitty laptop and a good desktop. Its hard to keep up with gaming with a laptop, whereas with a desktop you can just upgrade whatever your bottleneck part is for fairly cheap. The GFX card in a laptop is not nearly as powerful as the equivelent desktop part. #### mobile << #### desktop. Even big laptops have terrible heating issues; I just got my mobo replaced a 2nd time, and mine is 17''. . . And I take very good care of my laptop. In the three years I've had it, no bumps, no drops, I clean it, I keep it on a cooling pad almost 100% of the time, I check the temps and all. The feature I notice most is actually the screen. Higher resolution (my laptop is 1920x1200) is really kinda nice.

If you're not a pussy you wont have a problem lugging even a 17inch laptop around, but with any good laptop, there is no such thing as battery life, so you'll need to lug the power supply around too (and in my case, the cooling pad).

As for the RAM comment centreri made, I've maxed my 4GB RAM a few times, but I was using Wolfram Mathematica for some pretty nasty calculations. If the 8GB RAM is cheap its not a bad idea. If its expensive then don't bother.

If you don't want any bloatware see if you can buy the laptop without the operating system, then buy windows yourself and install it. That way they can't install shit on it before you get it