Help Me choose a laptop!!Please.

It is $100 above your budget, but check out the ASUS UX305LA. It's an all metal ultrabook with a 10 hour battery, Haswell i5, 250GB SSD (This means lightning fast boot and application load times) and 8GB RAM. It also has a 1080p display - perfect for watching movies!

For college, you want something light and with a long battery life. Lugging a huge laptop around quickly becomes tiresome. So does finding an outlet in the middle of class. The UX305LA is more than powerful enough to meet those needs. It doesn't have a touchscreen however.

http://www.amazon.com/Zenbook-UX305LA-13-3-Inch-Titanium-Windows/dp/B013KKANTE/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1451252071&sr=1-1&keywords=ux305la

If you really can't spend more, take a look at the HP Pavilion x360. Similar specs with a plastic body and smaller SSD, but with a newer CPU. Also has a touchscreen and a longer battery life, but is thicker and heavier.

http://www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-13-s128nr-13-3-Inch-Full-HD/dp/B014X4UAUI/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1451251993&sr=8-13&keywords=envy+2+in+1

Basically, for a college laptop what you are looking for is:

• 
  ■ A 13.3" screen to keep it portable
  ■ A long battery life (Preferably 7+ hours of real world usage).
  ■ An i5 6xxx, 5xxx or 4xxx in that order of preference (5xxx will be a model number like 5200U)
  ■ 8GB of RAM minimum.
  ■ Weighs less than ~4lbs.
  ■ As thin as possible.

What is nice to have but not essential:

• 
  ■ A touchsreen.
  ■ 1080p display.
  ■ An SSD (Note though that this means you have less storage space).
  ■ Looks nice!

This is my personal list of priorities. Your's may be slightly different depending on your needs, but the essentials shouldn't change too much. Both of the laptops I mentioned will last you through college, with the ASUS mostly likely lasting far longer!

My internet is extremely slow (Boo data caps ) so I couldn't take a look at your picks unfortunately. That's why I gave those guidelines along with my recommendations, since the ones I recommended are from researching for a laptop for my dad a few weeks ago and may not be the best available.. However, I will set those pages to load and tell you what I think in a few hours .

I had a look, and it turns out those are very viable options! The best one I think is the i5 Dell; it's within your price range and has all the right options.

The Lenovo is needlessly more expensive and is virtually identical to the Dell save for being able to convert into a tablet; more of a gimmick than a feature in my opinion. The other Dell is a waste; you don't need an i7 for what you are doing. Mobile i7s don't make much sense in any case actually. Go for the i5 Dell, and spend $50 on a 1TB WD My Passport for storing your files. Don't forget to have a back up strategy too; losing your college work isn't fun. Another External HDD would work well, and you'd backup both the laptop and the primary external HDD to it periodically. If you have any questions, please do ask!

I'd go with the Zenbook. It will probably be more durable than the others too, thanks to it's metal body. If you have the budget, it's the best option.

Laptop / Tablet hybrids are a fail, no two words about it. Windows 8 simply wasn't ready for prime time; though it made for a relatively good tablet experience, using it as a laptop was unintuitive. Windows 10 is actually quite good for using as both a tablet and laptop (Different modes for each) but still it's UI is nothing compared to Android or iOS. Right now, using a laptop as a tablet just doesn't feel right; it's too cumbersome and time consuming. The idea behind it is good, but execution still gives you the impression that the technology is in Beta on most hybrids. If you want a good experience on a hybrid, the only one that does it right is Microsoft's own Surface lineup. They are very pricy though.

Don't worry about power; any of these laptops (Or should we say, Ultrabooks) will handle any productivity tasks with ease. I'll take my mum's HP Elitebook Folio 9470m as an example. It was one of the first proper Ultrabooks released way back in 2012 (As a result it was crazily expensive for it's specs!). It's got an Ivy Bridge dual core i5 3427U, 4GB of RAM, a 180GB SSD, 1366x768 14" display, Windows 7 and an all metal body. At the time, it cost $1350. To this day, it's my mum's daily driver and has given us zero issues whatsoever. It handles everything from Excel to Outlook to Facebook (With multiples of everything open) just fine. My mum practically runs her entire business on the laptop. Why am I telling you this?

Let's compare it to the UX305LA. With that you get a i5-5200U (Two generations newer, more power efficient and substantially more powerful), 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a 1920x1080p 13.3" display, Windows 10 and an all metal body. It's also thinner, lighter and most likely will have a longer battery life. In short, it's far superior to the 9470m in almost every way. And it costs only $750.

Which brings me to my point: Technology is evolving so fast that a current mid-range $750 laptop is much more powerful than a $1350 top-end laptop three years ago, all the while become thinner and more compact. Judging from my experience with the Folio, you'll be set with the Zenbook for easily the next 5 years, and most likely far longer. In this case, don't judge a book by it's cover .

It depends really. The K501UX has better specs and will do substantially better in games, but the trade-offs will be weight, portability, design (The part plastic K501UX won't be as refined as the all metal Zenbook) and most importantly battery life. Those beefier specs and larger screen consume more power. If you're ok with that, then the 15.6 is the better choice. Keep in mind that you pay a premium for keeping things thin.

I'd take the Zenbook; 15.6" is just too large to carry around every day (And the K501UX is 1.8 pounds heavier than the Zenbook). 14" is really the max I'll go for a laptop that needs to be carried around frequently. The final fit and finish is bound to be better too, as the UX305LA is part of ASUS's upmarket Zenbook series whereas the K501UX is targeted more at gamers and as a multimedia laptop, judging by the discrete GPU. The reviews on the K501UX say that with the screen on lowest brightness, using the iGPU and just typing a word document (ie: maximum battery life mode) it lasted 8 hours. You can expect this to be considerably less under normal usage. ASUS advertises a 10 hour battery life for the Zenbook, so under normal usage 8 hours is totally possible.

If you are fine with those drawbacks, then go for the K501UX. It is hands down the more powerful laptop. If not, the Zenbook will handle your needs perfectly well and will last you a long time.