Good night, I buy decently used laptops all day for around $50. Just test them for YouTube 1080 play or an anime fansub video from some horrible place, then open 20 or so news sites at the same time, if it can handle that then it will work for you. Tigerdirect an Newegg have decent deals for refurbished laptops that are mostly the pervious years' business models that are mass produced, meaning that replacement parts can be had cheap including extended life batteries (especially those Dells). Just make sure the thing is running Windows 10, that can save you from buying something old. And lastly, ALWAYS BACK YOUR $H1T UP, laptops break at the worst moments so having more than one backup for your data and your computer is just good practice.
At under $600 I'd suggest something like this one. Assuming you're in the US this will probably be close to your best bet for your budget. Here's the rundown on the specs 15 inch laptop with keyboard with numpad (very useful for data entry like Microsoft Excel) Full HD 1920x1080 screen Core i5-7200U - Intel's i5 processor line is middle to high end. 7000 series is the latest mobile series from Intel. 8GB RAM/256GB SSD - 8GB RAM will easily hold about 25 tabs in memory without chugging. And 256GB storage on a speedy SSD should serve you well when booting up or loading games. GeForce 940MX - Dedicated nVidia graphics card, low/mid range from last generation (but also doesn't use much power when you're not gaming), will probably run current games on low settings and older games on higher settings. Sure, 15.6 inch laptops are kind of bulky but as your only computer it's probably not good to get something too tiny. And this leaves the rest of your budget for a mouse and maybe some headphones.
Why do you need a 700GB HD? Do you store everything on your hd. It's better to have backups, usb drives, and/or external hdd. That way all your work won't go when things happen. And they will happen. Always do.
lol, had a 1 tb. never had a problem with it. but if you need that peace of mind, you can have different hard drives i guess lol. and for important stuff. meganz has 50 gb free so. and then can store like shows, games, everything without having to plug in shyt and stuff.
i was also going to suggest that laptop. the 940mx is strong enough for light gaming or gaming on low-medium @op i3 i5 i7 i9 is just feature sets. unless you are a heavy user, a quad core i5 will be enough for gaming and i3s enough for facebook but i never suggest those
This is true but the average user doesn't know how to do backups very well to begin with. However, I also like the idea of lots of storage since you don't need to carry around an external HDD to a class everyday. This is coming though from a guy who uses his laptop to game, watch moves, and do programming stuff on his laptop. Of course its recommended to get an external HDD to backup important files and this is what I do with my movies, writing files and etc but this is not the time to recommend it and is a different topic entirely than what the user wanted to know.
To add onto my own post: this is the kind of laptop that's a jack of all trades. Everyone recommending you build a gaming pc is missing that in school you probably need some portability. Over time you can add external storage, some speakers, maybe an extra monitor on your desk. But standalone it's already good enough to do a little of everything. I keep my critical work backups in the cloud. Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Onedrive give you a few GB of free space online that you can keep synced in case of catastrophic data loss (like your laptop being destroyed or stolen.) Plus, if you need to print in a computer lab you can just re-download your files from the web. Keep your schoolwork there. For movies an external USB 3.0 drive is plenty fast enough.
There are plenty of good laptops for $600. My current laptop cost me less than $400 and I keep 300+ tabs at all times. The firefox I'm currently using has 422 tabs open at the same time. The most minimum you need is 4GB RAM (but all modern laptops offer this by default), one of the newer Intel i7 processors (there are several types, the older i7 is worse than the newer i5, but i7 introduced in the same year are usually better), and a non-integrated graphic card.
You need laptop I suppose since everyone carries that shit to college, don't buy apple ever, if it has linux it might be cheaper since I think they charge you windows, then just install windows yourself. Even if you aren't a gamer, 600$ laptops are pretty shitty because they will be slow just running the OS, 800$ the same but should be less or normal if you find a good one, also focus on processor ram and SSD if possible (if you use mem sparingly,instead of saving every movie,game...), if it says it has great gaming graphics....you don't need that.
Check out: https://www.notebookcheck.net/ They do the most comprehensive reviews of laptops. As for specific, you are going to have to clarify your usage. Do you plan to carry it a lot? Like do you expect it to be light as possible? size of screen you want, are you going to use it on your lap or on the desk. etc.
Haven't check the site yet, but those last few things is very important for college. You are highly likely to carry this laptop around everywhere, so it can't be too heavy. If you planning to carry it by hand, test carrying similar weight and size object for a feel. If you planning to carry with a bagpack, consider if it actually in it or not. Most standard backpack I see have space for a 15(16maybe) inch screen, unless you actually for bagpack made for certain laptop size(not expensive, but you prob not going to find one in store). I would also recommend try to decide on what specs you want now, but wait til the Monday after black Friday to buy it.(can't remember what that day is called, but it should be cheaper then.
I'm not sure about the price but you need to buy the laptop that contains INTEL CPU to support your researches and also support further updated software