The Best Student Computer

[mfratt]

I was reading an article on Digg that said that the MacBook was the best student laptop. I posted my disagreement, saying that Thinkpads are better computers all around. My question to put forth is what do you think is the best laptop for students? And dont limit it to just Thinkpads. I personally find the X60s is the best one for this purpose, but it is out of the budget of must students. What say you?

[christopher_wolf]

....Digg is taken that seriously? It had all the appearances, to me, of a collective comedy site, but I digress...

A Thinkpad is the best laptop for a student considering what it was made for; solid business applications, extreme robustness, powerful yet very mobile processors, and a suite of applications installed and the system preconfigured to run optimally. Nothing gets in the way of studying on the Thinkpad and it can be hauled to and from class/lab/meetings with other things in the bag and you don't have to worry too much about things breaking. It does cost alot at first, but save up, then *do the work you should be doing as a student* and it will more than pay for itself (just like a business, research, or industrial setting).

However, if it is to be used for goofing off, playing around, maybe downloading some MP3s, loading useless bloatware like a spaz, and/or the communication of various Chuck Norris jokes as well as a general slump of grades, then you need something that imbodies that in a cheapish plastic case that is Mediocrity Incarnate. A cheap "Student Priced!©" Dell, basically. There are hidden addition costs here, for sure; the price of fireproof underwear, medical/burn unit bills, slump of grades, etc. that end up making it the *most* expensive of the lot.

The rest can be described as follows, in no particular order;

1.) Alienware Laptop; See Dell laptop above

2.) HP Consumer Laptop; genuine imitation attempt at Dell

3.) HP Business Laptop; genuine imitation Thinkpad without the tech support but with the cost

4.) MacBook; a good solution if you want to run Windows XP and OS X at the same time and a good balance of size, portability, and looks. May be more expensive to maintain.

[Dead1nside]

I've seen a lot of students with the Apple Laptops, haven't yet seen anyone running Bootcamp on there macbooks though.

I don't think the apple laptops are priced well enough yet, it's still £700 with student discount. I'm getting a T41p for £600 and it's better.

Yes, Mac OS X is actually quite nice, but I don't want to develop cross platform for Mac yet. No need, just make my code portable.

So, the good thing about the MacBooks are that you can essentially run: XP, Mac OS X and Linux. A proper cross-platform dev environment.

[K. Eng]

3.) HP Business Laptop; genuine imitation Thinkpad without the tech support but with the cost

I disagree.

My sibling was looking for a business class laptop before college, and the HP solutions were generally $2-300 cheaper than their ThinkPad counterparts ($1500 versus $1800 for the equivalent configurations I looked at, summer of 2005).

I would say that the HP nc series is 95% as good as the ThinkPad T or Z. At 83% of the cost, that's a serious value proposition.

Here's an example: I customized a ThinkPad Z61t and an HP nc6400 (both 14.1" widescreen notebooks) with basic specs for a student who just wants a machine for office work, music, and other basic tasks:

Core Duo T2300E 1.66 GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB 5400 RPM HDD, CDRW/DVD combo drive, Intel ABG Wireless, Intel graphics, 3-year depot service warranty, Windows XP Professional. The only difference is that the HP system has a 6-cell battery while the ThinkPad has a 4-cell battery.

The HP system (EN176UT#ABA) comes to $1,199.00
The ThinkPad system (944033U) comes to $1,433.00
The HP system comes in at ~83.7% the price of the ThinkPad.

My frugal parents would not have approved a ThinkPad purchase in 2005, and I doubt they would approve one now.

I think I could justify a 5-7% price premium for a ThinkPad, given that they do offer the best combination of good design and ruggedness, but a 15-16% price premium is too much.

[tfflivemb2]

I would say that the HP nc series is 95% as good as the ThinkPad. At 83% of the cost, that's a serious value proposition.

But where is:
The support?
The ability to repair your own system, thanks to the HMMs?
The proven longevity of the systems?
The ability to get parts/accessories cheaper, as the result of different systems using the same parts/accessories?

[K. Eng]

But where is:
The support?
The ability to repair your own system, thanks to the HMMs?
The proven longevity of the systems?
The ability to get parts/accessories cheaper, as the result of different systems using the same parts/accessories?

If you go to HP's small business site, the HMMs are freely available. I've used them to look up the specs and take a look at the internals of the HP nc6230. They are there. For example: nc6400 manuals. HP nc series are generally as easy to upgrade as a ThinkPad, for stuff like RAM, wireless cards, optical bays, and HDDs.

Longevity of a system is never guaranteed. I've seen ThinkPad 600Es that have taken a severe pounding and had coffee spilled all over them, and still kept going. And I've seen my own T40, which I took really good care of, expire time and time again.

As for parts commonality, the nc series use the same power adapters, optical bays, docking stations, etc.

I concede that I have not had dealings with HP support.

The point of all this is that good design, availability of maintenance manuals, ease of maintenance, and commonality of components are not exclusive to the ThinkPad line anymore. If Lenovo wants to compete they are going to have to be more competitive in price.

[christopher_wolf]

Maybe, but as far as I have seen over the 5 years that I have had use/repair experience with their non-Omnibook systems, it is almost a show that is being put on. There is a good deal they could have improved on their laptops since they stopped the OmniBooks; yet they have ignored simple engineering principles. On one, I had to *remove the screen and base-top bezel* to remove the keyboard. Why? Who knows. In addition, the HMM for it, or what passed for it, was *not* clearly marked and did not show any way to remove the speakers which was required to get the keyboard out. This was not a sane decision and the HMM bordered on atrociously bad documentation for the system. Again this was a *$2000+* HP laptop and it took me an hour to get the keyboard out without breaking anything. These experiences of mine with the post-OmniBook series support have spanned nearly 5 years. Just because they look good on the surface doesn't mean you can expect good service from them as well as what you would get with a a Thinkpad.


There used to be a joke, originated way back, that HP parts manuals were huge and the machine configurations were highly complex and difficult to understand without the help of a rep. This used to be a funny thing that would be thrown around the labs when we had to fix HP scopes and various other equipment. Now, though, it involves going through a multi-hour process on the phone with their support to get a new HDD; a HDD, mind you, that has yet to show up for the better part of 6 months. That is not "great service" or anything approaching what I have dealt with from IBM. This has also happened with my older HP laptop; HP owes me, for that system, a HDD, complete memory replacement, a new battery, and a new power supply. According to them, from nearly *all* the problems I have had, they would either project a long wait time to get my systems back from their repair or offer to quickly ship the parts to me so I could do it. After that I had to deal with either amazingly confusing documentation (which support will not really help you with as I found) or downright *wrong* documentation relating as to how to install the parts.

As to long life? The only HP laptops I have had last almost as long as my Thinkpads were the good OmniBooks which HP should have kept. HP quickly went from "invent" to "follow everybody else" after that and it shows on most of their "media" laptops. There is a reason that the Thinkpads are recommended by the TSW here whilst even the business HPs are nowhere to be found there (and they even sell Dells! Yeah, they are Dells, but even they can cut some pretty [censored] low prices on account of that far better.)

Serious Value Proposition? Well....Maybe; that is, if one considers a genuine imitation Rolex, expecting actual customer support, a good value proposition. In which case, I may have some inventory for that.

Ever since they droppped the OmniBooks, HP has tried to combine the likes of IBM, Apple, Sony, and Dell into their notebooks to get the best, ahem, "value" out of them; this typically results in systems that are mediums of comprimise between either end of the spectrum. Instead of getting the best of both worlds, they got the worst. They got caught between Dell's extremely aggressive pricing and so-called "value" (because included higher end features costs more), IBM's absolute high-end Thinkpads and their robustness including features, and Sony's media-feature packed Vaios. They didn't end up getting professionals who wanted "value" with the same features as other systems, but instead managed to lose more customers to Dell and Sony because they had either "media" packed systems or really cheap systems.

All the points that Steve made were, and still are, quite valid and somethint that *HP* needs to address before they can start getting taken seriously in terms of high-end laptops. Not discounting their systems by cutting out their strong points. HP's entire approach was to be innovative and, had they stuck to that and not gotten rid of those that promoted such an idea, they would have a line to really rival the Thinkpads now. I think they forgot you can't discount hard work, intelligence, and real effort instead of cramming systems full of every single option and then slashing the prices. They should have been directly up there with IBM in producing high-end, business/research oriented laptops that are robust and efficient and *not* trying to slum it out with Dell whilst trying to show they are on the "edge" by cramming features into their laptops; which is where they are now.

Ah, well....They shoulda, coulda, woulda; still doesn't dent the fact that the Thinkpad is the ultimate choice here.

[JaneL]

Ever since they droppped the OmniBooks, HP has tried to combine the likes of IBM, Apple, Sony, and Dell into their notebooks to get the best, ahem, "value" out of them; this typically results in systems that are mediums of comprimise between either end of the spectrum.

I believe you and K. Eng are talking apples and oranges here. It seems you're thinking about models that generated from the old HP while K. Eng is thinking about models that generated from the old Compaq business line. There's a world of difference there.

FWIW, I agree with K. Eng. I use an HP business model every day since it's my work-issued notebook. Would I buy an HP business model for my own use? Probably not, as I've said here before, I don't like the feel of the keyboard.

But every other feature of it is comparable to the ThinkPads including driver availability for Win2K or WinXP and the HMM at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/suppo ... 622160.pdf It's a tough, solid, durable system that is giving me good service despite its being carried back and forth to work and other locations in an over-loaded wheeled bag that gets bumped in and out of a car and over curbs.

Also in a large corporate setting, from my perspective, support is a non-issue since my support comes from either internal desktop support or from a contracted vendor. From a corporate perspective, either HP ponies up the support required for their product to be compatible in our environment, or the next vendor moves up to take its place.

[tfflivemb2]

But every other feature of it is comparable to the ThinkPads including driver availability for Win2K or WinXP and the HMM at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/suppo ... 622160.pdf

Wow, they have improved leaps and bounds on these HMMs. The last few that I have looked for has been nothing like this. They have been closer to the Compaq versions which tell you very little and are very cryptic.

I am considering backing off of my attacks on HP....atleast for this issue.

[mattbiernat]

I was reading an article on Digg that said that the MacBook was the best student laptop.

I got an ibook in december last year. The reason why i got it was because i was just tired of spam, virus and other crap that comes out of interent (yes not very smart decision but i admit my mistake). i also wanted to try something new. i checked various reviews on ibooks and it seemed like they were around for a long time and all the known problems were fixed with it. I got it fro $1,000. It was very over-priced product as i could have gotten dell or hp for $300 less. now i thought i was going to have a really good quality product. nope... a month later after the initial excitment of a new computer goes away i've noticed several problems with my ibook. 1. the screen is very poor quality, compared to my 4 year older toshiba. the screen is leaking on all four coreners. the plastic is glued to the screen and it is not completely glued ->there are holes in between the screen and the plastic. 2. the battery is sticking out about 2mm more on one side than the other 3. the keyboard space key is 1mm higher than the other 4. the plastic that covers the entire ibook flexes even when you put your hand on it. now i went back to the store to see if i can compare these problems with other notebooks. and yes all ibooks have sticking out batteries, i've seen few sold with sticking out space keys and all of them are made out of cheap screen, poorly glued to the plastic around it.
And now when MacBooks came out i've checked them out too. They are also made out of cheap and thin plastic that flexes, the screen was improved, the keyboard seems the same as in ibook. however i've seen pieces of plastic coming out of the screen.
Such cheaply and poorly put together computer is no way ready for any serious student. I need a notebook that can survive getting squeezed in between molecular bio and o-chem book. apple computers are simply not made for protection from impacts or falls or for even carrying in backpacks. if you really want an apple go for powerbooks - those cost even more than thinkpads but they seem to be the only ones well made (except that aluminium bends).

[AlphaKilo470]

Speaking from experience, I'd reccomend an old Pentium II or Pentium III era ThinkPad or a Pentium II or (early) Pentium III era OmniBook because of the build quality, functionality and fact that they are new enough to run modern productivity and office software but old enough that they can't really do much that could distract one from any important work and old enough that you could acquire one for under $200.

[nem0]

I used to work in a university tech support shop, and we saw a ton of broken down Dells, HPs, and Toshibas, but rarely any ThinkPads. That was what cemented my ThinkPad lust -- they were built tough, and the only time we saw one in for repairs was when a student did something really stupid.

I would hesitate to recommend a Mac because the software tends to be expensive, and they don't like to play nice with predominantly PC campus labs (and tech support personel!). On the other hand, for someone without a lot of computer knowledge, they do reduce the need for support, since they get less spyware and other gunk. We only saw Macs when they were physically broken and had to be serviced by Apple themselves.

(Somewhat off-topic, but if you're seriously recommending a laptop for a student, it's best to tell them to talk to their profs and department heads first. At my uni, for instance, the graphic design and architecture programs require Macs after the 2nd year, and I'd hate to tell someone to shell out a couple thousand on a ThinkPad, only to have to spend 1.5x that on a Macbook the next year.)

[dannyp]

nem0 you speak the truth!

[K. Eng]

But what % of the campus used those brands? If the vast majority used Dell, HP, and Toshiba, and few people used ThinkPads, one would expect to see many more broken Dell, HP and Toshiba computers.

I used to work in a university tech support shop, and we saw a ton of broken down Dells, HPs, and Toshibas, but rarely any ThinkPads. That was what cemented my ThinkPad lust -- they were built tough, and the only time we saw one in for repairs was when a student did something really stupid.

[nem0]

But what % of the campus used those brands? If the vast majority used Dell, HP, and Toshiba, and few people used ThinkPads, one would expect to see many more broken Dell, HP and Toshiba computers.

Can't argue with you there. I think most students end up with Dells because, well, what else are you going to buy if all you know about computers you learned from TV commercials?

[pianowizard]

I used to work in a university tech support shop, and we saw a ton of broken down Dells, HPs, and Toshibas, but rarely any ThinkPads. That was what cemented my ThinkPad lust -- they were built tough, and the only time we saw one in for repairs was when a student did something really stupid.

How about Sony? I think many students use Sony Vaio laptops.

[Thinkpaddict]

Speaking from experience, I'd reccomend an old Pentium II or Pentium III era ThinkPad or a Pentium II or (early) Pentium III era OmniBook because of the build quality, functionality and fact that they are new enough to run modern productivity and office software but old enough that they can't really do much that could distract one from any important work and old enough that you could acquire one for under $200.

BINGO!

The best laptop for a student is not a new laptop, but an old Thinkpad. Second hand T2x are going now for less than $200.00.
Of course, if the thing dies on you you still have a problem because of the lack of warranty. In that case, I'd say salvage the HD, sell the rest of it for parts, and get another one. Either that or replace the offending part if feasible.

[KristianJ]

Speaking from experience, I'd reccomend an old Pentium II or Pentium III era ThinkPad or a Pentium II or (early) Pentium III era OmniBook because of the build quality, functionality and fact that they are new enough to run modern productivity and office software but old enough that they can't really do much that could distract one from any important work and old enough that you could acquire one for under $200.

I went down the road of a PII Dell Latitude about 3 or 4 years ago...however in hindsight it wasn't the best choice by any means because of the cracks that developed around the hinges and the simple fact that it ended up being far from ideal for the apps I need to run for my studies and other activities. I'd considered a T20 back then - had I thought more about build quality, it probably would have been the option I'd gone for.

Looking at what students at my uni campus use, I've not really seen any brand used more than others. Only ever saw one ThinkPad besides mine (which was a R5x of some sort).

[dsigma6]

all you see on campus are cute macs and tiny, insanely cheap looking gateways. there's a few dells in the mix too- they're probably the only new ones around due to the price. most of the time i get a "that's ugly" comment about the thinkpads. then i start throwing punches.

[Thinkpaddict]

all you see on campus are cute macs and tiny, insanely cheap looking gateways. there's a few dells in the mix too- they're probably the only new ones around due to the price. most of the time i get a "that's ugly" comment about the thinkpads. then i start throwing punches.

When some moron tells you that your Thinkpad is ugly just turn around and smile. Unfortunately bad taste is becoming mainstream nowadays. Thanks to this forum I know I'm not alone though

[Thinkpaddict]

I went down the road of a PII Dell Latitude about 3 or 4 years ago...however in hindsight it wasn't the best choice by any means because of the cracks that developed around the hinges and the simple fact that it ended up being far from ideal for the apps I need to run for my studies and other activities. I'd considered a T20 back then - had I thought more about build quality, it probably would have been the option I'd gone for.

I think the key is not to get something simultaneously old and bad (that is, a 4-year old Dell). Get something old but good (Thinkpad).

[nem0]

How about Sony? I think many students use Sony Vaio laptops.

We didn't see many Vaios, either. Probably too expensive for most students

[KristianJ]

I think the key is not to get something simultaneously old and bad (that is, a 4-year old Dell). Get something old but good (Thinkpad).

Yes...I did learn from my errors Now my younger sister has to deal with Dellosaurus (which is what I call the Dell now), and it's sitting on my bedrom drawer waiting to have Windows reinstalled after it crashed...could be there a while

[Thinkpaddict]

Dellosaurus.

Learning from your own mistakes is what separates the great from the [censored]. I've done my share, and no doubt will continue to do so.

[JaneL]

FWIW, I had a chance to do a little work on my HP this morning and can report how it went. I needed to replace the existing memory with 2 1GB sticks - one for the external slot and one for the internal slot.

I unscrewed the cover on the bottom of the notebook, popped one of the sticks in the external slot and screwed the cover back down. Then I removed the 3 labeled screws holding the (dreadful) keyboard in place, turned the unit over, slipped the holding tabs out, lifted the keyboard and replaced the internal stick. Put the keyboard and tabs back in place, replaced the 3 holding screws and was done in less than 10 minutes. Most of that time was spent in trying to decide which 2 of the 20 tiny screwheads in my kit would fit the screws.

I did look at the HMM beforehand but didn't really need to. It was all pretty standard stuff.

[wantathinkpad]

I would say a Thinkpad then HP. Why because Thinkpads are the best and the warranty and ease of use and self-repair/installations is so much easier. HP's business lines is great.

Macbooks are great but that can't be fixed and upgraded as easy as the other companies. The keyboards are fixed and memory is expensive. Their standard warranty is only 90 days and limited. ANd the tech supports take awhile to fix it. Also software and upgrades are expensive.

When it comes down to theand the college lifestyle(going to an from classes, moving from desk to bed, parties etc.) how good the tech supports will be very important. So if you were to get a Dell it should be a business Latitude series because I heard they are fine and tech support is great.

Moral of this story. Quality, ease of use(installation of memory, keyboards, longetivity and WARRANTY. And finally Thinkpads are the greatest.

[whakojacko]

Thinkpad's are the best, but they are too expensive for most students. I was only able to get my nice t60p (2007-93U) because I got a huge educational discount. I mainly see dells, thinkpads, and macs, because thats what my univ. gives discounts on

[joh]

Wow, I read all the posts!

[ThinkPad R]

I would say it would be obvious what the poll would be if you asked that in a thinkpads.com forum.

Rather go aroudn in dell or HP forums (ha they don't have one) and ask what they feel about it.

In fact, I have a thinkpad & I love its keyboard, but it has windows xp & is not reliable


If you are a student, then you need a computer that works all the time in terms of OS & software w/o crashes, legs, etc.

You need to get into the classroom, sit down, take out your books, your laptop, turn on, microsoft word, and take notes right away.

you can't go oops the computer froze.

[GomJabbar]

In fact, I have a thinkpad & I love its keyboard, but it has windows xp & is not reliable


If you are a student, then you need a computer that works all the time in terms of OS & software w/o crashes, legs, etc.

You need to get into the classroom, sit down, take out your books, your laptop, turn on, microsoft word, and take notes right away.

you can't go oops the computer froze.

I use XP on a ThinkPad, and that is not my experience.