Laptop for College?

Yes, another "What laptop should I get?" thread!

Actually, I don't want so much a specific laptop as some general features to look for in a laptop. This will be for my son who starts college next fall (but wants the system now to do some gaming when we go on vacation. )

Of course, first of all I want bang for the buck. I'm thinking of staying with a name brand like HP or Dell. However, name brands tend to charge a lot for future upgrades, extra batteries, etc. I know Dell is bad about having non-standard parts but their reliability is good. What about AMD vs. Intel? This won't be cutting edge (budget is around $1500) so it might not matter. (I might do some OC for him but that's not a big factor.) It seems that HP charges less for an AMD of the same speed. I know the speeds don't compare; 2.4 GHz AMD doesn't equal 2.4 GHz Intel so I have to look into more specifics.

As far as games, the ones that would tax the system the most are LOTRO, DoW Soulstorm and Oblivion.

I'd highly recommend that if you're going with one of the major name brands to go along the lines of one of their 'business grade' laptops. Far more durable, much higher quality parts. HP-Compaq business, Dell Vostro/Latitude, Lenovo Thinkpad. May not get as much 'power-per-dollar' but the service and system itself will take you much further.

Battery life is key. Personally, I've never found much difference between the internals of a "business" laptop than a "home" laptop.

All laptop companies use "non-standard" parts since, for the most part we're dealing with no standards. The only standardized parts in any laptop are the network card, RAM, media drive (the mechanism itself), and the hard drive.

Dell Laptops tend to share a lot of parts within their generation. This makes repairing them easy since 12 SKUs may be the same keyboard (and most good part companies list all the known compatible SKUs) but one SKU has a gray pointing dot on the keyboard, and another had a red one, and another is missing it entirely, etc.

Make sure you get the biggest battery available. Being in a lecture hall and running out of battery sucks big time. For school, I bought a $300 800MHz iBook a year and a half ago, and it's been great. It still gets ~5 hours of battery life, and is a far better machine than one of my classmates 17" HP wiz bang Core Duo machine. While he runs out of battery by the end of a class and I'm still able to work.

If he wants to game, I'd say a desktop in his dorm/apartment would be a better option. Laptops that are decent at gaming tend to have poorer battery life than their counterparts using low end graphics hardware. Also I know more than a few people who have had the misfortune of having their computer die shortly before a paper/project is due. Having two computers rocks.

Well you can look at the Dell XPS 1330. Solid notebook and once O/Ced on the gpu, it can run most games on low settings and older games are much better. Its light, decent battery life and packs alot of performance in a small 13.3 package.

When I was 17 and entering college, I had the same feeling.

Tell him to wait until when he is actually entering college. The computer will be a year newer, he will much better off.

Case in point, I had a P4 laptop before I came to college, returned it. By next year I got a Core Duo for the same price, more RAM, etc.

Vacation? He should be exploring the new surroundings because he can game any other time...