Laptop for College

I am starting college soon, and I need a decent laptop that I can carry around.  

 

I was thinking of getting the Acer C7 Chromebook for $199.99, and installing a Linux Distro on it.

Think this  is a good deal?  Or are there better laptops out there for a better price?

 

I generally do not want to spend over $200.

 

Acer C7 Chromebook

 

That chromebook is no longer available at the link provided, now you can only find the newer $50 more expensive model. At which point the Samsung model is preferable because it simply feels more stable in the hand than the Acer one. I've picked them both up and played with them. They are both fairly small and very lightweight, but the Acer model has excessive levels of flex for my taste. But I'm using a 13" macbook pro from mid-2010, and I can pick my 5-ish pound laptop up by the corner of the screen. So I'm used to Lenovo Thinkpad levels of robustness. If you are willing to spend about $330, then HP sells a chromebook also powered by the Intel Celeron. The primary benefit of this model is that it is incredibly slim for having a 14" screen. Screen real estate becomes rather pressing for things that aren't just word processing. Just expect these devices, when not running Chrome OS, to be exceptionally slow. None of these have a processor speed above 1.7 GHz, with the Celeron based ones being around 1.1-1.2 GHz. Also note that none of these are in posession of particularly robust graphics in any sense of the word.

I see.  I kinda don't want one now.  What laptop would be better suited for my needs?

There are simply very few laptops near that price range. Give me a bit and I'll see what I can find.

I found this one: http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-T400-ThinkPad-7417/dp/B001EH8GOA/ref=sr_1_10?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1371524479&sr=1-10&keywords=lenovo

 

For that price, all I can find are refurbished business laptops, or other older laptops with equally insufficient specs.

That would work, I was looking at the HP DV2, I really liked it at the time, but I really don't have any reason to. It's somewhat powerful for a 12" notebook from a few generations back, but whatever, I liked the looks and the size of it. I've used a laptop similar to the Lenovo in that link, and the keyboard is nice, the trackpad is adequate, the knubble pointer thing is useful and the screen works for web browsing as well as word processing. It should run Ubuntu or another distro very well.

I personaly would get a windows tablet. Laptops and tablets are both expencive so ether you go cheap, buy a chromebook or android tablet (Totaly usable, I did so in my finaly 3 years of high school) or spend a chunk of money on a good windows tablet. Any laptop you buy for under $1000 will mostlikly be slow. That Lenovo laptop you just linked is 5-6 generations out and will be godly slow. If you want a real cheap but stable laptop, Chromebook but dont expect it to do much at all other than document processing. If you dont have internet, even less you can do. Android tablet has a huge market, usable and you can buy android based laptops aswell. They will tend to work well but are still somewhat resticting if you dont have a keyboard with it. Finaly a windows table (My prefered option) are reasonably priced, optimised and can run many more programs, investing in a windows tablet would probably be best.

I didn't know Windows had specially designed tables.

I have an equally out-of-date Macbook Pro with a Core2Duo and Geforce GTX 320M, and it's still pretty snappy even in Windows 7. I've also got a Google Nexus 7, which most people claim to be one of the best Android tablets on the market. While it is certainly a good tablet worth the money spent, it is often slow, and the screen does appear washed out by dent of comparison to any of the AMOLED displays put out by Samsung. In comparison, Samsung has recently dropped the price on their small tablets, so it may be worth it to pick up one of those.

Actually, they do have specially designed tables, it was called the Surface before they made a tablet and called it that. It was a computer that was also a coffee table and did lots of things. I think they keep them around now for use as development benches for software stuff.

Your Macbook Pro's GPU performs better than mine. wat