Laptop for College

With a number of experts on this forum, I thought it would be beneficial for me to request recommendations for a suitable laptop for my oldest grandson who will be attending college soon (majoring in engineering).

He wants ME, (go figure...) to help him shop for a relatively inexpensive laptop for basic college assignments and internet use. He won't, as far as I know, be taking any classes involving extremely difficult mathematical calculations.

I'm just looking for a suggestion for a basic laptop for college homework assignments and internet. I was thinking.... 8 or 16 megs of RAM and 520 GB HD? As far as a brand: HP?, DELL?, ASUS?, ???

Any recommendations would be very much appreciated. Oh, and Windows, not Apple. What about Core i3, Core i5? Are they sufficient for basic college classes? He will be majoring in engineering.

Oh, and any suggestions on where to buy, too.

Costco usually has some very good deals and they provide 2 years of support I think.

Mary has an HP Pavilion, the one that can be configured either as a computer or a tablet. Not sure what would be good for an engineering student. Probably for that more RAM because he will probably be using CAD and maybe 3D applications. I'm not much help here I'm afraid.

Actually, that was helpful Gary. Thank you.

Young people like the trendy things so the laptop presumably should be a good one :)

In that just mentioning some directions -> the best processor is the Intel i7 generation now, if the RAM is DDR4 then 8Gb RAM is enough for almost everything even in a gamer laptop, but there should be some graphics card in the laptop and better if that is NVidia. Plus there is a technology change currently in hard drives, that the HDD drives are going and SSD drives are coming, the SSD is much faster/less noise/less power consumption as having no moving parts, just still being expensive at this moment.

So a good machine is Intel i7 or can be also i5, but DDR4 8Gb RAM and graphics card Nvidia with around 4GB to keep it cheaper (Nvidia GTX 1080 is the top now), with SSD hard drive (or combo HDD and SSD to keep it cheaper).

Thank you csehz!

Hi Ron if the laptop is for college work I wouldn't spend much money on it as it's going to get a lot of knocking around. There're many ultra thin ones being sold at the moment and they flex in the lower half of the laptop and to get one that will last 3 or 4 years you need to spend over $1000. I would go cheap and they're some good ones kicking around with OK processor and H/disc like the Acer Aspire E 15 at around $330. You wont know the demands of your grandsons course till he gets well into his area of study and he might will be handling 3D files which will need a bit more grunt. So why spend a huge amount now when you don't know what's in the future for your grandson. Another one that I use a lot in the college that I now work in is the old fashion looking Lenovo ThinkPad 13 at $700 it's built like a tank and has great battery life.

Thanks Peter!

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Originally Posted by Ron Duke

With a number of experts on this forum, I thought it would be beneficial for me to request recommendations for a suitable laptop for my oldest grandson who will be attending college soon (majoring in engineering).

He wants ME, (go figure...) to help him shop for a relatively inexpensive laptop for basic college assignments and internet use. He won't, as far as I know, be taking any classes involving extremely difficult mathematical calculations.

I'm just looking for a suggestion for a basic laptop for college homework assignments and internet. I was thinking.... 8 or 16 megs of RAM and 520 GB HD? As far as a brand: HP?, DELL?, ASUS?, ???

Any recommendations would be very much appreciated. Oh, and Windows, not Apple. What about Core i3, Core i5? Are they sufficient for basic college classes? He will be majoring in engineering.

Oh, and any suggestions on where to buy, too.

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I majored in Engineering going to grad school (applying right now). My best advice is to get a light laptop so he can bring it to school. Don't worry about specs as you can read in this post engineering students don't need a special laptop , any of them will be fine for all of his classes. Most assignments are done on paper and most programs run on any laptop, theres a few programs that do need a powerful computer but we have computer labs for that. He can get any laptop he wants as long as he is ok using computer labs a few times. I was going to suggest a Chromebook actually...but its up to you core i5 , core i3 doesn't matter, 8GB RAM is nice to have though.

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I was going to suggest a Chromebook actually...

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Do Chromebooks support Microsoft Word? I would think a college student will need to write a lot of reports.

Ron - Another suggestion is to buy a refurbished computer. Woot.com (owned by Amazon.com) sells a lot of refurbished computers and you can get a major amount of computer for a lot less. For example https://www.woot.com/category/comput..._cnt_cdet_pc_2

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

Do Chromebooks support Microsoft Word? I would think a college student will need to write a lot of reports.

Ron - Another suggestion is to buy a refurbished computer. Woot.com (owned by Amazon.com) sells a lot of refurbished computers and you can get a major amount of computer for a lot less. For example https://www.woot.com/category/comput..._cnt_cdet_pc_2

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good question i thought they didnt but they do actually not microsoft office but a word editor and spreadsheets too. Dont need an internet connection either.

Plus you can install Linux on them making them pretty much a windows machine to install similar programs.

What i like about chromebooks is the battery life, its never ending, they boot up fast! extremely fast. I mean like turning on a TV, u can quickly look up info on the go (equations, definitions with an internet connection of course) as if it were a mobile device. Plus they never break/stop working...either. No viruses...the list goes on.

He probably will be reluctant to buy one but someday hell understand :) .