Help me find a new laptop!

[xxvictastic]

1. What is your budget?

$600 at most.

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

14-15"

3. What screen resolution do you want?

Probably 1366x768

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

Portable laptop

5. How much battery life do you need?

4 hours+? My old laptop was around 2 hours and it was definitely not enough.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop?

I will probably play the occassional silly RPG games when I'm terribly bored. (Gunbound, Maplestory)

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)

I need this laptop for college, where I'll be programming (CompSci). I'll also be using Adobe Photoshop CS4 .

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?

500 and above please!

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.

Any from the actual sites (HP, Sony, Dell, Toshiba, etc). I don't want to buy from elsewhere but their actual site. Maybe best buy and staples, too.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?

4 years

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?

Just a DVD ROM.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

Honestly, anything is good as long as they fit for the preferences I need (within the budget, etc)

13. What country do you live in?

United States

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.

I want an i3-i7 processor, please!

Thank you so much in advance. I am in serious need of a new laptop and this will be used for college as well (I'm a senior in high school at the moment).

 

[dotaloc]

I usually ONLY recommend machines with plenty of positive reviews. For newegg, I'd suggest the following, although the hdds aren't quite as large as you'd like and they don't have core-i series processors.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215190
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215107

Depending on your comfort level with tinkering, I'd get the cheap one. Then, I'd get a 128GB SSD for $150 or less and a external enclosure for the hdd that came with the laptop. Then I'd shrink the hdd (to ~128GB) and use clonezilla to capture it (hopefully, you have a spare or somewhere you could store it -- in theory, you could shrink, create an additional partition in available space, and store there?), then restore the image to the SSD and use the bundled hdd with the external enclosure as backup/storage.

Sorry if not meeting your criteria renders this not useful.

 

[mildsend]

I recomended this..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215272
use the rest of your money to upgrade your RAM for at least 4GB ddr3

or this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834158060
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834200411
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834200428
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834127562