I just went through this process for college and had a max 600 dollars. Always be watching your local stores for sales on weekends cuz college kids are shipping off so there are going to be deals.
www.dealsofamerica.com is a good website that compiles many sales going on the internet, as well as coupon codes to enter. cnet.com also does thorough reviews....
i would recommend this personally.
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...v1=Everyday+computing&series_name=G60t_series i was going to purchase this laptop for 450 on sale at a local officemax but the G70 series, (an upgrade of a processor) went on sale as well. but the G60 has an upgrade of hard drive space and 3GB memory for free and a hundred bucks off online. (dealsofamerica had a coupon code up for Hp laptops.)
I have witnessed many of my friends going off to college spend extra money because of not searching for deals, using coupons or waiting for a sale. Damn near every major electronics store has coupons you can get by googling it.
Also, personally i would stay away from dells. There 1545 and 15 inspiron's have had bad reviews of shitty disk drives etc.
Overall, feel free anyone correct me if im wrong i just caught up on the laptop game in a couple weeks but Look for either intel dual core or intel core2duo processors. They are the latest technology. any worthy source placed Intel far and beyond a comparable AMD athalon processor. the best processor i found available in any laptop under 500 will be a T4300 2.0 megahertz. If you are a gamer, 2gb ram would be preferable. as well as a 2mb L2 cache.
any questions feel free to ask.
