Best Buy Launches Laptop Line for Students
Best Buy narrows down the choice for students down to four laptops.
The back to school 'buying season' is one of the hottest for computer sales – laptops especially – and Best Buy hopes to be one of the premier choices for shoppers.
Best Buy today announced a new line of exclusive, customized laptops manufactured by Toshiba, Dell, HP and Sony that cater specifically to students.
The electronics retailer said that its computing team worked with students to identify most desirable features in a laptop, with these six characteristics emerging as the most important: extended battery life; low weight and portable design for easy transport; personalized design, yet professional; full virus protection; preloaded with necessary software (specifically a full version of Office Home and Student); and an affordable price point.
“Best Buy is in a unique position to listen, learn and apply what we hear from people as they interact with technology,” said Kelley Noreen, senior merchant computing. “With college students, we learned that while they notice a laptop’s appearance first, the design, portability and functionality are just as important. These students definitely taught us a few things and reinforced we are focusing on the things that matter the most to them.”
The four models feature battery life ranging three to six hours, weights no more than six pounds, a 14-15.5” screen size. While the hardware specs are all fairly standard for consumer laptops, the preloaded software is what will be of value to students. Each laptop comes preloaded with a full version of Microsoft Office Home & Student and 12-15 months of anti-virus protection
The laptops are priced from $649.99 to $799.99. Find out more on Best Buy's comparison page.

MSI laptops are superior in terms of price / performance / cost.
Look at newegg and you can find a Centrino 2 / ATI 4350 laptop for $650.
WOW!!! I cannot get over how valuable that would be as a student! Not really though. I can get Office Enterprise from my school for $20 and AVG for free...which would be times better than the Norton or McAfee that is preloaded on those.
WOW!!! I cannot get over how valuable that would be as a student! Not really though. I can get Office Enterprise from my school for $20 and AVG for free...which would be times better than the Norton or McAfee that is preloaded on those.
MSI laptops are superior in terms of price / performance / cost.
Look at newegg and you can find a Centrino 2 / ATI 4350 laptop for $650.
umm..........yea anyone who is into PC gaming knows laptops suck for gaming
Not when you own a G50VT-X8TW with 9800m GS with the possibility of BIOS flashing it to 9800 GTS speeds.
NOTE: Newegg don't sell them anymore. Lucky I got mine right on time.
They have new Asus laptops with NVIDIA GT 240m. Those are from new TSMC 40nm process which runs faster and consume less power. They should perform between 9800m GS to 9600m GT.
I remember Bestbuy is also selling an Asus laptop with GTX 260m.
Though a cheap laptop for business plus a cheap desktop for gaming and multimedia is probably better solution.
I won't agree that GT 240m runs faster then 9800m GS. First of all, 240m has less 48 SP and 128bit, but it certainly runs cooler in terms of temp goes. But yeah, it's between 9800m GS and 9600m GT.
As for GTX 260m, it's quite faster then 9800m GS, but I read on forums that it runs very hot close to 100C.
And what is up with the screen comparisons? Common users won't know what 720p means. They'll be like, "It's like a really nice TV screen," when in reality it's worse than all the other offerings on that page.
How would this laptop help with taking Calculus notes? Chemistry Notes? Biology notes? Using as a sketchbook? Playing around with video editing?
Let see... Open Office is free, so that would save student money. It can handle almost all the files students would get - and its formula entry for mathematical notation is pretty simple and uses standard key input (compared to Microsoft's Formula editor which is an ugly and slow beast). No ChemDraw (or their biology drawing software), and no mention of tablet pcs - so its useless there.
Oh, wait, were in the USA - students want to avoid math and science.
(Okay, so this was just a long-winded rant that boils down to: one size does not fit all!)
Students either get software for free with their school (MSDNAA), with p2p software, or will use free replacements (openoffice).
These laptops are probably 200$ too expansive because of software.
Typical idiot-proofing. Remember, most people are idiots, including todays kids.