Laptop for school!

[Hashey]

Hey guys,

This year I'm starting a new education(hooray!), but for the one I'm gonna do I need a laptop. I know crap all about laptops so could use some help in figuring one out.

Most of the stuff I'm probably doing with it is microsoft office stuff, but I might need to do things with adobe ps(& other adobe products) aswell. First thing that comes to mind when needing to do image/video stuff is an apple laptop, but those are kinda out of the price range with their 15" starting at €2000.

So any suggestions would be great!

[Tea-Assault]

Windows 7

[Jokerle]

I am a huge fan of Lenovo's Thinkpads. Great keyboard(!) and durability. I use a T 430s for work myself.
I only know T serie and a colleague has one from the X serie.

The cheaper serie (like L) dont offer what a Thinkpad used to be.

[KaptenKarp]

13" MacBook Pro with Retina is what I use for work

[matsif]

First off, need to know your budget. Depending on what you want to do with photoshop, expect to be spending a minimum of $1000.

If you think you can go without having PS on the laptop and instead doing that work on your desktop, I'd suggest getting a $300-$500 netbook that runs a full blown windows OS to do the office stuff. That's what I used my senior year of college, works fine for 99% of office activities except for extremely complex excel crap that you shouldn't be doing anyways. Plus it handles netflix and such fine for when you're between classes and bored, is lightweight and generally has better battery life than a full laptop. You could also go for something like an MS Surface with the keyboard as well and double it as a tablet.

If you want the full blown laptop, just think of it in terms of what you'd want in a desktop for the same function. Get something with a separate GPU chip instead of integrated graphics, with a minimum of 8 GB of RAM. SSDs are always a plus as well, as the standard 5400 RPM drives on laptops are horrible on load speeds. I've never had problems with MSI as a brand (until I burned it up trying to play the BF3 Beta on a 35C day with no AC or cooling accessories), and Lenovo is good as well (follow Jokerle's advice). ASUS is generally a good standby as well.

I would avoid anything Apple for the PC portion of things...anything they can do, an MS computer (and frankly most linux OSs nowadays) can do just as well if not better, and you get better customization options at vastly better prices than anything you'll get from Apple. Any Apple laptop is just going to cost you more for less performance, along with blocking you out of tons of control options that you're probably used to from your desktop.

hope that helps.

edit: for sake of my 'merican keyboard, pretend all the $ signs are whatever the symbol for euros is

[Necromancer]

http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/category/notebook/

Pick by CPU/GPU and customize the rest.
No OS will save you some money

[ZombieToof]

I can recommend the L-Series if you want to stay in a smaller budget. Keyboard, touchpad/trackpoint and AFAIK some displays are those of the better T-Series. L-Models are usually heavier and have a cheaper feeling casing. Also they do not support the feature rich docking stations, unlike the better models.
What's also nice with Lenovo laptops are the rather cheap spare parts like eplacement/secondary batteries.

I've got a 15" high res Lenovo laptop I prefer to work on. If I buy a laptop next time I will probably pick a lighter and smaller 13" for portability.

[.Sup]

I am a huge fan of Lenovo's Thinkpads. Great keyboard(!) and durability. I use a T 430s for work myself.
I only know T serie and a colleague has one from the X serie.

The cheaper serie (like L) dont offer what a Thinkpad used to be.

I had a ThinkPad and I loved everything about it except the poor quality display. For PS a quality display is quite essential. Maybe things are better now but Retina is still far better than anything else and with a 2k budget I would seriously consider a MacBook. Its operating is also pretty much hassle free unlike Windows where updates instal almost on daily basis. If you do decide to get an apple computer you should wait until September when the new operating system will be released, being free of charge, along with new tech releases and prices of older units will go down.

[Jokerle]

I am a huge fan of Lenovo's Thinkpads. Great keyboard(!) and durability. I use a T 430s for work myself.
I only know T serie and a colleague has one from the X serie.

The cheaper serie (like L) dont offer what a Thinkpad used to be.

I had a ThinkPad and I loved everything about it except the poor quality display. For PS a quality display is quite essential. Maybe things are better now but Retina is still far better than anything else and with a 2k budget I would seriously consider a MacBook. Its operating is also pretty much hassle free unlike Windows where updates instal almost on daily basis. If you do decide to get an apple computer you should wait until September when the new operating system will be released, being free of charge, along with new tech releases and prices of older units will go down.

yeah, agree. They offer IPS panels since 2years or so, but the default one is only 'ok'

Retine/Mac is another story and I would consider Apple only if you want to stick with it for all your gear