What laptop for school?

Hello everyone!

I'm looking to buy a laptop for next semester. I'll move to the dorms and I don't want to bring my desktop there. I'd mainly use it for coding and studying. A bit of 3D modelling, video editing and gaming on the side. So, please, give me recommendations.

 

I have had a Gateway laptop for several years. It is a great laptop ...... very durable. But, I would not recommend it as the keyboard keys feel slightly shifted to the left. Now, my son had an Intel at one time. I used it for awhile and really loved it better than my Gateway.

 

The best laptop for school is a 2 in one which converts from a laptop into a tablet and vice versa. These have a long battery life and excellent portability. It follows that these are the best qualities suited for college students in addition to the fact that they are sturdy as well as cheap. However, view come with reduced connectivity.

 

I can't say enough about HP.com. It is a great place to get your laptop. I paid just over $300 for mine and it is a quad core with an extra long life battery. You can build your laptop to specs at HP.com and then save a bundle when you buy it. My laptop from HP is very lightweight, much more so than my last laptop which was a Dell. So it would be easy to take to class and so forth. Check out HP.com, you will not be disappointed.

 

So, which one did you get anyways? I see that you posted this months ago, so I am hoping you would have bought one by now. I would get an i5 system with 8GB of RAM and a great screen resolution. I wouldn't go for macbooks if budget is a constraint, and I wouldn't go for chromebooks either because coding requires windows os or linux.

 

What program are you doing 3-D modeling with? I had classes at an art school and had to use Maya which was only really compatible with a MacBook Pro. My friend had a Window's based computer and he had a miserable time saving any of his renderings. If it's like a CAD program, I would ask your teacher what they will teach in. For me, my teacher taught my drafting class on a Mac in high school but I had an friend who was an architecture major who's teacher hated Apples and would only teach on a Windows based computer. So you should take that into consideration. But most art programs work better on Macs and most of the tutorials on Youtube are demoed on a Mac.

Having said that, I'm no sure about gaming on a Mac, I only work on mine. I haven't played any major games on my computer. Most games are more compatible with Windows and you might have to wait longer for a company to create a Mac compatible version of the game.