Notebook Hunter

Your budget is ideally $800-$900 – so you need to decide what’s more important to you, a nicely-specced allrounder notebook, or one with long battery life. Under $1,000, the two are exclusive. One look at the Notebook Hunter categories will reveal plenty of 15.6in allrounders under $1,000 powered by Core i5s, even Core i7s, that give you lots of features and are perfect for school. Even under $700 you’ll get plenty of machines with Core i3s, 4GBs of RAM and 500GB drives (which more than handle what school can throw at them), and under $900 you’ll get some with discrete graphics cards as well, giving you nice allrounders with the power of desktop PCs. So if you want some good value packages for school, head there. But, of course, the problem with the best deals under $1,000 is that while you can get some nice features, these notebooks lack the expensive engineering that extracts long battery life from them (what MacBook Pros do very well, for example). So if you actually have to carry these around with you all day, and not have to constantly search out for power points, you need to look at another class of machine. If you want a consistent 4-5 hours battery life look at notebooks with screens of around 13 inches and low-voltage versions of mainstream CPUs, as well as forgo DVD drives. The Acer Timelines are perfect for your needs but too expensive. Why don’t you look at the Dell Vostros? These are thin and light small business notebooks that we think are perfect for school use (http://dell.to/fE6N2a ). Business notebooks are built tougher than consumer notebooks because they have to survive being handed around in the workplace and being taken on the road. The new Dell Vostro V130 has a low voltage Core i3 processor and 13.3in screen (which will combine to give you your required battery life). With 4GBs of RAM and a 320GB hard drive, it costs $955. Re Sandy Bridge, if you can wait, you'll definitely see some amazing bargains. In essence, Sandy Bridge notebooks will affect the basic and low-end allrounder notebook categories by providing much better performance, or equal performance but better battery life. When they hit in force, retailers will have to get rid of a lot of dated notebooks quickly.