I am going back to school this fall, accounting major, and I need to buy a laptop that is light enough to carry with me every day. I have a full desktop for gaming, music & photo storage, so I just need a good laptop for school. Below are the specs I’m thinking of, I just need to figure out the hard drive size that I need.
Intel Core i5 or i7
under 4 lbs
8GB of RAM
802.11ac Wi-Fi
8+hrs battery life
1920 x 1080 or better
13 in screen
3 USB ports
Ethernet port would be nice
Aluminum build would be nice
$600 - $900
Thanks in advance for the help! 
@AvidMTReader
The first thing I would do would be to find the minimum requirements your school recommends. Now because you have a desktop and you are planning to use this laptop for school work, some light videos during down time, and maybe so pacman games during class I would recommend a hard drive of 500GB which is what most i5 or I7 have now a days.
Reasoning is as follows: many schools give you access to the cloud for 1TB during your school years, you also have google drive, if you have 2 computers most of your school work will be kept in the cloud in order to easily work on them either on the laptop or desktop. You are not a science or engineering major so I doubt you will need anything huge like some of the programs I have seen my friends use. I recommend looking at Best Buy daily for deals of the day, just last week they had an i7 laptop for 50% off because they were celebrating their 50th anniversary. so it was like $300. I am a MAC user myself, but I have owned all windows before college.
^^ Agree. I find 13" screen a bit small but there are many more options at that level than 14".
Solid state drives are faster and more durable but their capacity is smaller. If you are good with keeping a fair amount of your storage in the cloud, I’d go with solid state. Get as big as you can within your price range while getting all the other features you want.
We could not afford a solid state for my daughter but she loves her 13" 360 degree Dell Inspiron i7359. Hers may be a phased out model but they should be offering something similar. The 13" size is so much better for carting around. I thought she would not want to go to a smaller screen but she loved it from the start.
Previously she had 2 hp laptops and they each died just under 2 years out (luckily we had extended warranties) so this time I said we’re buying something else, not hp.
When I think of Accounting, I think of spreadsheets. A larger screen would make it more comfortable doing your homework. A HDD of 500GB should be fine as I agree with the other responders that you can always use cloud storage if you need more space.
Odds are that you do not need an i7. If true, then for the money, I would get more RAM and whatever size SSD you can afford. Hard drives are relatively slow, less reliable, and sometimes loud.
I’m seeing a lot of laptops in my range that have 256 GB SSD. If I’m not storing any photos or music on the laptop, is that a good size?
It seems really small to me but that might be due to the fact that totaling up all the hard drives I have installed, my desktop runs 3.5 TB.
Thanks!
Yes it may seem a little strange but you really don’t need a huge # of bytes as long as you have cloud storage available, and in your case, a desktop with huge storage.
256 is what we put in D’s laptop last go round, before it died for good. I still have that drive & would have put it in her new laptop but don’t want to risk any warranty issues. She never lacked for space or speed with 256. I think that’s the highest capacity available in your price range, not even sure if I’ve seen larger in any price range, not that I actually look at top of the line products.
Have you analyzed how much of your 3.5 TB you are actually using, and how much of that is photos, videos, and music, and perhaps programs you wouldn’t be putting on the laptop?
I would be installing about 15-20 GB of applications on the laptop plus the OS. So it seems like 256 SSD would work.
How about the HP Spectre X360? I think you can find a deal on one with a 256GB SSD at the upper-end of your price range. Aluminum body, nice touchscreen, good performance, big trackpad, etc. As others have mentioned, 256GB will be plenty given all the cloud space available. You can shuffle big items in and out of the SSD if necessary … but I don’t think you’ll need to. I have a 256GB SSD in mine and I have full Office, full Visual Studio 2015, and full Android Studio installed. Still have 105 GB free.