Calling all college students and people who make less than six figures a year! You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get a great laptop!
Lately, there’s been a real push to make great laptops more accessible. On the extreme end, you see people creating basic, no frills units for astronomically low prices, and while this is great for some people, the specs on these machines aren’t very impressive. One laptop, whose maker proudly sells it as the Hundred Dollar Notebook (even though the market price is more like two hundred!) is fine for basic word processing, but does not have wireless internet, and runs on about five hundred megabytes of memory. So, yeah, whoop de doo! It’s only a hundred bucks and it doesn’t do anything!
Luckily, the fortunate side effect of this push has been that a lot of good laptops have actually had their prices dropped to the five hundred dollar range. One of the best of these would probably be the
Dell, in particular, has been trying their best to give users expensive quality laptops at a low quality price. Perhaps the crowning achievement in their bargain lineup would be the Dell Studio 15.
While most of Dell’s cheaper laptops are geared more towards simpler uses, the Studio 15 is created with the gamer and multimedia whiz in mind. Fresh out of the box, it can handle most games, it can do photoshop and basic video editing, and with a few small upgrades, it can be brought up very nearly to the level of, say, an Alienware rig.
The laptop starts around $650, though you might find it anywhere from $550 to $750, so be sure to shop around before forking any money over, because, realistically, you should add about one hundred dollars to whatever you wind up paying.
That one hundred bucks should more than cover all of your basic upgrades. It’s kind of designed as an all-around system for multimedia folk, it runs games, it does sound editing, it does video editing, and it does graphic arts. It does all of them well, and none of them excellently. With a few small upgrades, you can customize it to be very nearly perfect for whatever you have in mind, but out of the box, you might find it just a tad lacking.
Still, you wind up with a total cost of maybe less than seven hundred bucks, which is about half what you could expect to pay buying something that is top of the line fresh out of the box.
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As a working tech that specializes in laptops. I would just like to say this artical is very, very misleading. First of all a Studio 15 can’t even get close to the performance of an alienware rig. Second If you going to pick a laptop DON’T pick by name. Do the research on each model, Processor,FSB,L2 Cache,hard drive and Video card. Finally check the gamer blogs and ebay to find out which laptops are having the most hardware issues.
I agree with some of what James says – however, an Alienware rig will cost you.
As a college student, I’ve been trying to find a laptop that will balance performance, portability, and my frugal budget. An Alienware, though strong in the performance category (make no mistake) probably will lack in the portability and/or budget category.
I have found that sometimes those brand name -puters are getting to be strong in all three categories – with the right upgrades in mind.
Furthermore, I wish to suggest NOT to upgrade the hard-drive or RAM because those are things “capable” people can do easily on their own – emphasis on CAPABLE, for much cheaper than the upgrade costs. CPU/GPU and other stuff, however, shouldn’t be attempted.
What about the HP Pavilion G60-230US 16inch laptop as shown on this website: http://learning-about.com/laptopcomputers/218/hp-pavilion-g60-230us-16-0-inch-laptop/ is that any good ?
Wow. This whole thread needs to be redefined. Great concept; What’s the best all round? At least you would think folks would post a few good candidates. I think it needs more defintion because its too broad. Who thinks of the best all-round notebook for games? It’s like saying what the best gas-mileage cummuter car for hauling roofing materials. You need to eliminate games from the all-round category.
I dont have an answer beyond know what you want your computer to do. The cost will be the lowest you can get based on how specific you are, and how well you know what you want it to do. We are after all talking about having the best fit to (?) for the ($).