eww...dell

a $250 netbook from newegg is more than enough for school work.

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.

Yes, McCrapfee and Norton are almost like virus's themselves. lol

wot everyone above said plus... um... how are they personally customizable or rather, how are they more so than a standard laptop?

i guess students don't like playing games on their laptops...ya right

I am a student and I have been looking at laptops and I won't buy a single one of those piles.

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

Laptops aren't meant for high end gaming, they are meant to play solitaire on the couch, at least that is what most people need a laptop for in my expirence.

Yeah, you're just going to buy that laptop ........ but what about Viruses!? Get our Norton Security Pack or we'll cry!Oh, oh, you have to get our data back up plan, and useless doesn't cover anything warranty, and laptopbag usbsticks burnablecdsmousemousepadandevenmorelaptopcrap!!!!!! *breath* that will be a whole lot of money sir. Thanks for shopping at best buy.

they could knock a few hundred dollars off if it didnt come preloaded with office. every college student knows that the universities sell software for dirt cheap.

Not when you own a G50VT-X8TW with 9800m GS with the possibility of BIOS flashing it to 9800 GTS speeds. 3Dmark scores vary between 9K-10K.

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 do believe you can probably play WoW or most MMORPG's on these just fine, thank you.

Every university I know has free AV software that they provide to their students, so including it in the price doesn't make sense for a consumer(assuming they are targeting college students). Also, on campus, there were very good deals on major software like Office. I guess it comes down to if the student just wants something ready to go or not. Obviously, the TH readers wouldn't go for this, but I doubt they are targeting us.

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.

The Dell says it has DDR3 RAM till you click through to the actual product page. Not that it really matter all that much, but it is false information.

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.

What kind of students were they talking to? Obviously not those taking art or science courses.

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 do not want Office, Windows and an anti-virus with their laptop.
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.

For the parents and typical students needing to buy a notebook, it makes it much easier for them. Its not geared towards someone who is shopping for something specific or great.

Typical idiot-proofing. Remember, most people are idiots, including todays kids.

And don't forget there are tons of other free options such as GIMP,OpenOffice,etc. which are free and quite good.

Free antivirus' are horid, look at any independent antivirus study/report and you will see that Norton and such will out perform anything free in any situation. There is a reason avg is not used in enterprise settings.

every student wants Microsoft office because it has always been the standard in every school and university

if students want a laptop for gaming then they will go high end . if there just going to use it for school then they will get this or something similar

I've had several badass virus on my laptop. I've had also Norton, Mcafee and Panda when it happened. My last crash and reinstall everything (due to virus) occurred eight days ago. Once I installed AVG Free it recognized the virus on my backup and on my wife's pen drive.

Conclusion: Don't just go punching free software, they might be better then you think. On a PC I will always go with Karspersky from now on, but on slow laptops and their slow hardware free antivirus is the way to go.

Why is the Asus U81A not listed? It seems like it would be an even better fit for students at 4.7 lbs., not to mention it's super-slim.

Well, at the school I go to, the software package is completely worthless. College has licenses with M$ and so I can get MS Office and MS XP/Vista for ~$7 each. And I have to run some antivirus, too (though I *actually* use AVG, even though theirs is installed).

Which means I'd pay $150 for things I can get for $20.

Marketing ploy for retards.

agreed

I work for Geek Squad at a Best Buy targeting consumerist middle america, and for many kids and parents who have limited knowledge about anything computer related, these laptops can and do serve a decent purpose, which is providing a ready-out-of-the-box experience.

But I wouldn't be caught dead using the pre-installed norton, or paying that much money for a laptop that can't s my d.

Anyone else stoked about Diablo 3?

well i still got my dell laptop running a Pentium 2 @ 266mhz...oh yeah baby
with a whopping 10 gig hard drive

I saw Dell, I didn't bother reading...