Here are the "student laptop" suggestions I promised my workshop students a few days ago. I have selected them based on the information from various of sources (notebookreview.com, sina.com, pcmagzine.com...). Here are the top 5 laptops I would recommend for the student in the beginning of the year 2007:
1. Dell 1501, on sale for $599 US at Dell's site. It has a nice silver and white platinum look to it. Almost looks as "cool" as the Mac Book Pro, but MUCH MUCH cheaper of course. It uses Mobile AMD Sempron™ Processor 3500+. (Dell newly adopted AMD CPU for their line of product.) It's got a 15.4 wide screen, 512 DDR2 SD Ram, 80G hard drive, a nice ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 with 256MB HyperMemory™. The beautiful thing of buying a Dell computer is you can configure it on the web. I would personally suggest one to swap the default setting with 1G DDR2 SD RAM. Because Windows Vista is gonna need the extra juice. The final price should come around $649. See if you can find some online coupons (search "dell coupon") on this item.
2.Sony VAIO FE, around $1155 US from SONY's web site. This one is a little bit more expensive than the Dell, but it comes with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5500 (1.66GHz), 2GB RAM, and NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 7400 with 335MB Video RAM. For those students whom want to play some 3D games like World of Warcraft or simulations like Second Life, this computer will definitely do the trick. You almost don't need to upgrade anything from the default package.
3.Acer Aspire 5102WLMi, another great laptop. For $650 US, you get a laptop computer that is AMD Turion64 x2 TL-50 CPU. (the AMD version of Intel's Core Duo) 1 GB 533 MHz DDR2 RAM, 120 GB Hitachi 4200 RPM HD (very reliable HD), and ATI Radeon xPress 1100 integrated graphics card. The weak point of this laptop is it's graphic capbility. Due to the graphic card, you may not want to use this for intensive 3D gaming. But this is just my oppinion. It really depends on what games are you plan to play with the laptop.
4.Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (Previousely know as IBM ThinkPad), this one is a little over $1300, but it comes with T7200 (2.00 Ghz) Core Duo Intel processor (a little faster than SONY VAIO FE's default CPU), but only 1GB RAM, and a 120 GB HD, ATI X1400 128MB Graphic Card. But it does come with a cool, and unique Fingerprint Scanner like the other ThinkPads...
5.My final choice would be HP Pavilion dv6000t for around $1000 US. Now, this is really a “bang-for-the-buck” laptop. Why? Because it comes with Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (same as the ThinkPad T60), a Fujitsu 120 GB HD, Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 with 256 MB graphic card and 2G RAM. This set up is really close to the SONY VIAO FE. The only thing I can see the difference is the Graphic Card where you can get the extended 128 MB memory from the VIAO.
My top pick? It must be the SONY VIAO FE. I think Sony just lowered the price on this model after February. These 5 models are suggested by me because of their low price, hardware configurations and buyers' reviews. It's only aimed to students laptop selections for the beginning of 2007. Good luck and study hard!
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