<p>I am a prospective engineering major at UF and there isn't any explicit requirements on their site so I need some general laptop recommendations. I will be purchasing the laptop with my financial aid money at the university store. The price would probably need to be less than $700.</p>
<p>I would one with Windows since I am familiar with it and I will probably not use it for gaming (mainly for school), the most recent game that I would like it to be play is TF2, if possible.</p>
<p>So I just need some general specs since I am not the most tech savvy person. So tell me the importance of the following (add more if I am forgetting any) and what I should get based on my price range.</p>
<p>Processors specs (e.g. ghz)
RAM
Hard drive space
GPU</p>
<p>To be honest your price range is pretty horrendous for the type of hardware a engineering student will be looking for.</p>
<p>This is a pretty good start. The specs are pretty good unless you need to be doing some heavy video rendering or gaming. The battery for it won’t be that great but the price point sorta calls for that. </p>
<p>I believe that is a last generation dual core i5 so it’s alright it wont be winning any races anytime soon though. </p>
<p>If you gave us more of an overview on what kind of programs you will be using and what exactly you will be doing we can help give you a better idea/recommendation.</p>
<p>Well currently I am not sure what field that I want to go into, my official major is “exploratory engineering” which basically is undecided but engineering. If I dislike engineering then I will switch to math and statistics.</p>
<p>I don’t have a lot of money so I have to use my financial aid money for a computer and I will also need to purchase a graphing calculator (TI-89) with it.</p>
<p>I have a desktop that I am bringing that was given to me a few months ago but I would like laptop for portability.</p>
<p>Well you might be in luck. That laptop has pretty good specs for the price. The only think I would be concerned with is the battery. You definitely won’t be computing on gold but it will do if thats your budget.</p>
<p>Since you are bringing your desktop i would look at getting a netbook. Look for something with long battery life so you dont have to plug in during classes with long winded profs. You want something light weight and tough because you will carry it everywhere. You also want something relatively cheap so if you drop it in a puddle of water or loose it, you wont be out much.</p>
<p>I personally have bought 2 refurbished HP minis (I was using the first one in my colleges steam room when it went out… guess it got too wet so I had to get another) They are tough and around $150 used or refurbished. I like that they have a 3/4 keyboard that is really easy to type on (after about a day i started preferring it over a normal keyboard and im a big dude) I typed a 10 page paper on it this semester without my fingers ever getting tired like they would after just a couple pages on a normal keyboard.</p>
<p>Make sure you back up your stuff on your netbook… even though they are tougher than most laptops…people break or loose them all the time.</p>
<p>I highly suggest looking at HP’s Pavillion laptops. There is a coupon you can use the get 30% off the base price. If you aren’t a person who cares about getting a high resolution screen, you can land an i7 quad core computer with a great graphics card for 900 AFTER tax.</p>