Best Laptops for College-Bound Grads
May 21, 2012 02:40 PM EDT by Chao Li, Web Producer/Writer Your favorite twelfth graders are deep in the haze of Senioritis as their last days of high school approaches, but soon they’ll be packing up to go to college. You promised them a computer — one that will help them make the jump to higher education.
Finding the right student notebook can be a challenge, because different types of study require different types of hardware. You wouldn’t necessarily buy the same notebook for a computer science major that you would for a film major. Fortunately, there’s a student laptop out there for every interest and every budget.
For Undecided Majors: Acer Aspire TimelineX 4830TG-6808 ($729)
If your grad is a Jack-of-all-trades that has yet to dedicate on a major, the 14-inch Acer Aspire TimelineX 4830TG-6808 could be the perfect choice. The TimelineX's discrete Nvidia graphics combined with a 2nd-Generation Intel Core i5 processor can help with photo editing, writing the next great novel, computer programming, audio editing, or making short films. Good enough for gaming, the $729 TimelineX 4830TG-6808 weighs just 4.6 pounds and got 7 and a half hours of battery life in our tests.
Read Our Full Review of the Acer Aspire TimelineX 4830TG-6808
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May 21st, 2012 at 3:21 pm
What, no Dell XPS 14z? For my money, that laptop sits at a pretty college student-friendly intersection between price and features.
May 21st, 2012 at 11:31 pm
So, surprisingly little talk of which computer to choose for, you know, school stuff. I guess you mentioned it with the Macbook and hinted at it with the Lenovo (why would you need epic battery life in a school library?), but what computer would you choose if you’re going into engineering, for example?
And of course, probably the most important feature for any college student (assuming we’re actually talking about computers for school rather than expensive toys for students) is a high-quality display, probably matte. Because most dedicated students will be spending a lot of time staring at documents and pdfs on their computers.
June 8th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Yes. I don’t understand why engineers, the people designing (pick your own verb) all of these products, receive little attention to none. I’d like some advice on what computer I’ll need for a math and science intensive curriculum, possibly integration with digital note taking. I’m also a little worried about not being able to balance battery life with portability and processing power, which I’ll need for circuit design (EE majors!).
I may be wrong but it eems this way from a google search for “best laptops for engineering students”.
September 28th, 2012 at 2:18 am
For EE atleast, math, science and epectrical ngineering usually youll only need sufficient memory to run matlab all SPICE circuit simulation software that is free does not use more resources than matlab pretty much any laptop nowadays with 2gb of memory sufficient hd space and a 1.6 GHz+ cpu is way more than enough for this curriulum. Any full blown EE industry standard software you need runs either on linux and/or too expensive for someone to purchase on their laptop i.e. tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per license per year . I know my xps m1330 laptop lasted me more than half my undergrad and grad education (and still used just for my music now since work supplieswith a computer) where most of its functionality isnt used since i wasnt big on gaming and movies.
January 29th, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Fire the writer of this article. Garbage!