college laptop

Hello, i was wondering if you guys could answer a few questions for me. I am leaving for college soon and i am in need of a laptop. These are the laptops that they are recommending to me.

http://utoledo.edu/business/COBA/LaptopModels.html

Someone said that if i wait for the 6500 to come, i will have to wait till mid-september to get it, and i think that that is too long of a wait.

What makes those laptops better than any other laptop around the same price. you can install the same programs and everything on a gaming laptop than you can a business one, right?

So i was wondering if i should get the best laptop that i can find now, wait till mid september to get one of the new ones, or go with dell 830 and customize it almost to its full capacity? And have in mind that i probably have roughly 1600$ to spend.

Thanks

 

Those are some pricey laptops, but of course looking at the specs they are really souped up. They also have the three-year full warranty on them, so that really jacks the price up. If money is not a concern here, go ahead and build it like that. If you are trying to save some money, that is very possible too. What will you be using your laptop for? Casual internet, documents, office programs, that sort of thing? If so, you should be able to get a sub-800 dollar laptop from dell. Add the extended warranty to that and it will jack the price up a couple hundred dollars though. The warranty is up to you.
Gaming laptops, business laptops, they're all the same as long as you configure them with decent parts.
I recommend you go to Dell and play around. Click on the business page and try configuring the vostro and latitude with different parts and see how the price is affected.
If you plan to buy anything with a Nvidia geforce 8*** model graphics card in a laptop, you may want to hold off until dell says if they've fixed a recent defect problem with those cards. Anything else and you should be fine.
I go to college and was able to configure a ~$750 Dell Vostro laptop that suits me fine and does everything I need it to do. Of course, I did not get an extended warranty either. Just the default one-year.
Good luck. Post back if you need more help.

 

Thank you for your help. I probably wont do any hardcore gaming or anything. Just getting caught up wanting bigger and better heh.

Im looking at the one that they recommended to me, the D830 from the website. Do you think that there will be a price drop after the 12th when the new e series comes out?

And 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M is the only option on the video card. I built a desktop computer a little bit ago, but never anything with laptops. Is that card just an average one that they throw in there to have one in there? Right now i am using a 7600GT in my desktop, how would it compare to that?

Thanks again

 

The difference is that they have a workstation card vs a gaming card. Basically a gaming card is has certain features disabled to run games faster, and the workstation card has those features turned on for CAD and rendering. Personally I always go for gaming cards, even for the CAD workstations here at work, because they are a lot cheaper and can graphic work just as well unless you require all the features of a quadro/fire card. We have 7950GTX's here and they do great at MEP/Microstaion 3d work, and can render a 1.25million square foot building in a decent amount of time.

So it really comes down to your budget and what your major will be. But as for waiting, personally at this point I would wait for the refresh if september will be the month for that.

 

Some of the new models are available today by the way, check the website.