Seems a little on the pricey side.
How about this:
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store...517000?tduid=b44edbc40c5c877a6e4ae1cd1b7d7b85
Slim, light and durable is what you want for college. Cheap would also be a plus.
Personally, I would think that less than 13 inches would be too small. Your kid could differ. I would steer towards 15.6 or so.
This could be close to all that:
http://www.amazon.com/Dual-Core-2-1...ok&refinements=p_n_size_browse-bin:2423841011
Not sure about how great the performance would be, but for note taking and battery life I would think this would be a pretty good machine.
Whichever you choose you really really want an SSD. Its close to essential.
$450 is still a little pricey. Newegg (and a couple others) has been selling the Lenovo G50-80 and ACER Aspire (forget the model) notebooks that are pretty much identical configs for $400 (plus tax where applicable) with free shipping; same chipset, same CPU, 6GB to 8GB RAM, 750GB to 1TB HDD, DVD-RW, 15.6", et. al.
Yeah that is shipped from a 'marketplace' seller, not Newegg. Newegg appears to be OOS (out of stock). They were selling the G50-80 model for at least two full weeks from $390 to $420. I purchased two, about two weeks apart.$549???
Dont be that guy...
I disagree, be that guy. It always amuses me that folks will buy laptops as "fashion statements" and while Mac laptops are well built they really have no hardware advantages for the most part over an equivalently priced PC laptop. The op has pretty clearly indicated that he's looking for a budget laptop and there is no such thing as a "budget" Mac laptop.
Anomaly,
I would agree with the Lenovo being suggested and I wouldn't discount going with an i3 processor. For the most part an i3 does the job quite nicely and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and an i5 on day to day tasks. Now if the duties that this laptop will be doing include things like heavy duty video editing or AutoCAD then I'd step up to an i5.
If you are going to College in the USA and you do not get (like almost every one in the pic above) the Laptop with the light in the front cover.
The one from microsoft has an 1TB 5400rpm hard drive...
They dont have an option for swapping it out...
I've built my own desktops so can I swap the drives on the laptop myself?
I am not for, or against, and make no attempt to Analyze and justify.
I am just describing reality.
If you are going to Collage in the USA and you do not get (like almost every one in the pic above) the Laptop with the light in the front cover.
Chances are very good that you will buy one after few weeks in college.
Whichever you choose you really really want an SSD. Its close to essential.
OK, the ACER above reportedly is a pain to access the RAM and HDD for upgrade. Here is another ACER with the same CPU that shouldn't need upgrading. It's pretty loaded, for just a little more than the Dell @ $470.00 free shipping:
ACER Aspire E5-573G-59C3
- Intel Core i5 5200U
- 8GB RAM
- 1TB HDD + 8GB SSD
- NVIDIA GeForce 940M 2GB VRAM
- 15.6" non-touch screen
- Windows 8.1
Dedicated GeForce graphics, 8GB RAM, 1TB + 8GB hybrid SSHD, but back to smaller 4-cell battery with 2500 mAh and still no DVD optical.
All of these laptops I have seen use 1366x768 screens which in my opinion have just too little screen real estate. I would try to shoot for at least 1600x900 if not 1080p but that may not be an option of you are trying to get money spent on the low end.
Microsoft did have a deal on the Asux UX305 for $599 after coupon but it looks like it is sold out. You could try looking for a used t430 or t440 with a 1600x900 screen. I got a t430s with an SSD for my folks for around $350. Performance wise they would be similar but the t440 would have better battery life with the haswell processor. The t430s only gets around 4 hours on battery. Comparison my Asus UX303LA which I bought for school gets between 6 and 10 hours depending on what I am doing usually.