Cheap Laptops for Students

There are a lot of students out there that need a cheap laptop. Like cell phones, it is likely to be the item most used in a students daily life. And with technology advancing and constantly dropping in price, there are more powerful notebooks that you can buy now with the same about of money in previous school year. One thing is that most students don’t really need are the powerful high priced laptops for what they will be doing unless maybe they are engineering or science students. For web browsing and word processing, the bulk of a student’s activates, you can take advantage of the low price leader type laptops that exist on the market.

The main requirements to meet while casually browsing online or at the store are that the notebook should be sufficiently fast and has enough memory to run the latest windows operating system and has Wi-Fi capabilities for Internet access. All new notebooks have this. But for an even more inexpensive option, if it is possible to do much of your work using the free and open source Linux operating system and open office, then you can really save a lot of money by going that route.

If your can use Linux, then buying a used or refurbished laptop on eBay, wiping the hard drive, and installing ubuntu Linux is a rock bottom and extremely thrifty alternative. It is amazing what people are selling on ebay for such a cheap price. I have seen used notebooks on sale there that are just slightly behind the times in terms of power but hove more than enough to power the efficient Linux operating system. Linux has a big following with college students so you are likely to find someone or even a group that can help you out.

Another recent cheap laptops for students trend to consider is netbooks. You may be able to do enough work using a new eeePC net book that has no hard drive running Linux or windows XP and which are about $200 and getting cheaper.

One has to step back from the situation a little and reason that if a notebook is such a heavily used item in a student’s life, then maybe the right question is “what gives you the best value if you can afford it?” In many ways buying the lowest end Apple Macbook or Macbook pro makes perfect sense because it comes with iLife and the add on “office like” package iWork is so relatively cheap. You will find that you don’t have to make any more purchases as you might with a windows based notebook such as Microsoft office. It may be difficult for cash strapped students to make a decision to pay something like about a thousand for a Macbook instead of five or six hundred for a windows machine but it may be actually worth it.

Here is a video of an interesting $98 netbook from China: