well in just a little over a year i'll be going to college and i was wondering what would be a good laptop for a college student.

My thought: since i have a realy bad hand writing( i sometimes cannot understand my own writing) i was thinking about getting a tablet pc so i could write and it would turne into typed text.
but one thing i want to make sure is that if i do get one, would i still be able to get all the different softwares i like and if i could play games on it?

what do you all think ?

P.S. dont give me advices on mac computers i'm just not interested in them

This post has been edited by etycto: May 31 2008, 06:35 PM

Well your last sentence really swung it for me, if you have bad handwriting like me then there is a chance a tablet pc won't work. You don't need anything special, it won't paly very good games but it would be okay.

1gb/2gb Ram
80gb/160gb HD
Centrino Core , maybe 3ghz you could get cheaply.
If you want it to play GOOD games you want about a 8600gt Graphics laptop then your looking at about 700+ but thats my opinion. I'd advice buying a pc and a laptop thats what I'm doing

£300 laptop - £752 (at the moment) PC. but thats a top of the range pc.

Depending on your classes, your better off getting a notebook, although I never have used a tablet PC, your very limited to what you can do with it, and so search for a laptop that fits your budget. I would check out Dell, Acer, or a HP and you would be set. Anything between $500-$1000 will be good enough for your 4 years of college and what not, I recommend getting a external hard drive though for back up, especially for research papers and essay's and junk.

If you have bad handwriting a tablet pc probably wont pick it up. The recognition software is mediocore at best.

I did a lot of research for a inexpensive portable laptop and found one that I got for myself and one for my mother she liked mine so much. It is the Fujitsu B3101D series. Touchscreen, Ultra Low Voltage 1.0ghz Pentium M, 512DDR, 40gb hdd.

It weighs about 3lbs and does everything I need it to do. It cost me about $300 off ebay business lease.

I suggest a vaio nr21z

It has an Intel T8100 (2.1 ghz)
3 gb of ram
a 8400 mobile (not too bad for gaming)

Hey,
One of my friends has the worst handwritting in the world and he has an HP tablet pc. I don't know the exact series no. though. But it has this handwritting recognition software and it DOES understands the handwritting. The thing is , the handwritting recognition software needs to be trained for proper use. He told me that it took around 10 days or so to train it and then after that it was a piece of cake. It works great and he rarely uses his keyboard. You can go for the Tablet PC but don't expect it to run Crysis on it

I have been using Asus F3Sc for one year. Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7100 @ 1.80 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Harddisk, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G(128->512 MB) etc.
I'm still using this and this is good enough. In fact all Asus series are very good I think.

By the way I bought a Toshiba PDA, and I would like to say that you shouldn't buy a Toshiba PDA, they are not god. But At PDA category HTC is the best, second is HP.

It sounds like gaming and your other software are more important than getting a tablet pc. I can't really suggest a specific computer to get but I'd suggest getting a mid-range laptop. It won't be too weak that you won't be able to play games and it won't be too high-end that you'd end up wasting your money. Since you're gaming you should probably get a 15-17in. laptop, depending on what you want. For RAM, I'd suggest 2GB because of gaming and other programs. For processor, I'd suggest any dual core processor - great for multitasking. If you do get a laptop, take battery life into consideration.