I'm going to be a freshman in college next year, and I was wondering-- is it important to have a laptop in college? I'm going into biomedical engineering, and the school where I'm going has several state of the art computer labs. Just a question to other people that have done this before, is there anything that a laptop is necessary for?
If so, does anybody have recommendations for any laptops?
If not, what should I ask for as a graduation gift?

all right before everyone comes in here and says "i never bring my computer to lecture!!!11" let me make it clear that having a laptop on campus is just so much more convenient for many other reasons, because i never bring my computer to class either.

my school has a lot of computer access too, but i always see a big line of people waiting to use them. i like being able to work on my own computer to save things or just screw around, at any time of the day, in my dorm room, outside, or in the library.

as for types, i went in to best buy and looked at a couple of the cheapest ones they had. i know someone who works in geeksquad and he recommended the 2nd least expensive one, which is a gateway and it cost me $600. for browsing the internet and doing schoolwork it gets the job done and i haven't had any problems with it.

I think I get what you're saying. It's more comfortable to work on schoolwork, projects and stuff on your own time, and on a computer that you are familiar with. It's also easier to have everything set up the way you want it and have everything saved where you want to instead of a flash drive or something.

Thanks, that really helps.

I posted this in this thread: http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2126472 but It also applies here

"for my freshman year of college last year I had a 15 inch Acer laptop. It had fairly low specs, 2ghz dual core intel processor, 1g ram, pretty crappy integrated mobile graphics chip. It came pre-installed with vista, but I put both Windows XP and Ubuntu on it. Aside form taking notes, I think the most important thing it did for me was keep me awake during long lectures. Browsing the web kept me from drifting off like most other people and I was able to at least listen in on the more important bits of a lecture.

Even though the specs were low I was still able to get a few of the classic games running like Diablo 2 and CS in between classes, and this was a lifesaver for me because I had a few classes with several hours in between, but because they were in the same building and I didn't feel like driving back and forth due to gas prices, I was more or less stuck with nothing to do.

Also a bit of advice: make a habit of saving all of your essays on a web-based email service like gmail/hotmail/yahoo. Especially if you're switching between computers. There have been at least 2 instances where I thought I had saved my essay or an assignment on on of my flash drives or laptop and it wasn't there. Having it on my email account allowed me to just dl it and not worry about having to drive back and be late to a class.

All in all I think a laptop is essential to going to college, regardless of if you have a desktop in your dorm. They don't have to be super powerful, but its always nice to have something to keep you from going insane at the worst possible moments."