Recommended College Laptops?

Hello everybody,

With my recent hard drive failure and apparent motherboard failure as well, I am forced to find a new laptop in time for college. The catch? I have 3 weeks until classes start, and I have very little money to spend for it. Does anybody have any suggestions on what laptop I should look at buying/building?

I would personally love to build a desktop, but I wouldn't be able to use that for classes.. However, if anybody has recommendations for a build, let me know! I plan on getting one together at some point in (hopefully) the near future.

As I tell anyone looking for a laptop, Lenovo is a good way to go. They are depndable and well priced. You might also check and see if you're college has any tech deals with computer manufacturers. I know my college did 30% or so off Lenovo computers. Never used it, but if you can find deals like that, it always helps the pocket book.

I can't really say a budget because I'm not sure what I'll have available. I just replaced the hard drive on my Dell Latitude, and I'm hoping that will get me through the next 4 years. I didn't anticipate having it back up and running this quickly, so now I'm moving towards working on building a desktop PC, and depending on what I can find on campus, I'll probably dedicate anywhere from $1500 to $2000 for it.

PERSONALLY, just throwing this out there, I had far more success hand writing notes during lecture classes. That's not to say I didn't often bring my laptop, but it was more to avoid the ridiculous situation of the labs at my school. Seriously, there are only 4 labs on the entire campus with the software my program needs and you're going to kick everyone out of the lab for your 10 person class using MS Office when the other 3 labs are fully packed, and you have the AUDACITY to tell us that there are other labs????????? Why is your class even scheduled in our building? Get out.

I don't actually have any suggestions, and don't know what kind of program you're going into (i.e. what computery stuff you'll be doing), but just keep that in mind what you'll be actually using it for. A lot of people bought laptops barely capable of taking notes, and they paid for it later on (a lot of people bought Mac Books too, and besides the ones that new about Parallels or other such programs, they also paid for it). So keep that in mind.

I'm not saying to not take notes on a device, it works well for a lot of people. But at the same time, a lot of people who used laptops for taking notes didn't actually take notes most times. They played games and were on Facebook all class. The one class I took notes on my computer in my final semester I was pretty tired with absolutely no cares left. Which was typical. But I don't remember a single thing from that lecture nor did I ever look at the notes again. Which was atypical.

That's all speaking from the perspective of not being in a mobile program. I was so lucky I barely avoided that gimmick. For the next intake it became a mandatory mobile program. I get that you're trying to stay current but you can't be a leader when the WIFI on campus is terrible until midnight and then for some reason completely disappears after 3 am. And by the way, giving a $80 discount on mobile textbooks is not a deal if you only have access to the book for a semester but need the textbook for 6 semesters. I could probably sell the physical book back and save more than with your discount.

So through all that ranting, basically my advice is to figure out if taking notes on a device works best for you and to make sure whatever device you get suits all of your needs through all of the years.
When I was getting ready to start school there were two laptops on sale that i was debating. One was cheap and very mobile, but it was an i3 with 4gb RAM. The one I got was a bit more expensive, but an i7 with 8gb RAM and some sort of dedicated graphics. I was tempted to go to the cheaper one, but for what I ended up needing, it'd have been useless and would have ended up costing me more since I'd probably have gotten a better one later on.

I just got a Surface Pro 3 128 GB, and I love it. Would recommend.