Looking to buy a Laptop for college, any help appreciated! Budget and reqs listed

Quote from PWPF : No, but I know about not wasting money. For a typical college kid, he will not even know the difference between a $350 and $700 laptop. Size, screen, whatever. They're all great compared to no laptop at all. Future-proof ness is overhyped. He's not a gamer. He's not compiling massive C++ libraries. He's typing term papers, and surfing the web. The worst "piece of crap" laptop that is made today can handle EVERYTHING he needs. The biggest issue with obsolescence is the Win OS corrupting. But, if the kid learns to restore or use Acronis/Ghost, he can use this laptop for years. Kid, save your money for beer. Buy a $350 laptop, and invest the rest of the money in IBM stock.

As I said, there's more to a laptop than the 3 printed specs on the front of a Best Buy ticket, although those do matter as well. With the intro level's 3GB or 4GB memory, even someone doing basic tasks can start seeing a bottleneck. It becomes easily apparent when you go look at some teenager's computer that has their music player open, some Office document(s), a browser with 5 windows (each window having 8 or more tabs, plus plugins), etc. More RAM makes the difference between just being able to have more of these applications open, versus having to send your applications to virtual memory. Depending on the major, the OP's interest in video and photography, her current music collection, her renting habits, etc. she could easily fill up the 320 GB hard drives that come standard on the cheapest laptops of today. Heck, my current laptop is currently using 400GB of space. And yes, you can (and should!) buy an external hard drive, but if you're in the business of carrying it with you or keeping most of your information on there, you might as well get the $700-$800 laptop to get yourself a 128GB SSD.

As far as futureproofing, it is very real. 8GB max RAM on cheap laptops means that your laptop is trash that much sooner. For example, my current laptop is an older, Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR2, and I'm starting to see performance drops. Heck, Firefox with a few windows open is currently taking up nearly a gigabyte of memory! Specs on computers keep getting better, but programs keep finding a way to suck up more memory, seemingly as fast as the manufacturers can keep up. Also, the cheapest laptops of today come with a few USB 2.0 ports, plus sometimes a (lol) PCMIA slot, while many of the $700-$800 laptops come with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports.

If size is a concern, there is a noticeable difference in size and weight between the cheap 15.6" laptops and the 13"-14" laptops. A 9-year old girl could tell the difference between a 15.6" screen with a TFT 1366 x 768 display, against a 14" LED-backlit higher-resolution screen (any of the ... x 900 displays available). You often get higher-resolution webcams, and other nice-to-have features like Bluetooth, maybe a backlit keyboard, etc.