My daughter is just about to start her second semester in USC Law. Up until now, she has been using a HP laptop that I bought her about 5 years ago (just before she started undergraduate). That HP has a i5-2410M, 6GB of ram, Win7 (she didn't do the upgrade to Win10), a 600GB HD, and 14" screen. It has been a pretty solid machine with only battery life (about 45 minutes) and feeling sluggish to complain about. She has a budget of $850 - $1,000. This money is coming out of leftover from her last semesters loan. So, while she can spend that much, spending less would allow her to borrow less this upcoming semester. She is open to a Mac, but doesn't really think it will work out within this budget.
Out of 582GB of available storage, she has only used about 73GB since doing a system recovery just before starting last semester. So, I'm thinking something with a 256GB SSD would prove to be sufficient (flash drives seem to be pretty large and cheap, so if worse came to worse, we could add 128gb of storage for like $50). She like to keep the screen size at 15" or under.
I've been out of the PC hardware scene for so long, I really don't know much about what to suggest. So, I figured that I'd ask here for any suggestions while we are in the research stage. She'd like to make the purchase before January 9th. Any thoughts?
1) Who makes a good laptop nowadays? Is HP still good? Is a Mac out of the question?
2) What specs should we set for CPU, Mem, etc? (Nothing less than an i5? At least 12GB of ram?, etc...)
3) Anyone here have any specifics things that should be considered for a law student? IE: I asked about a larger screen to make it easier to read, but she usually prints out longer articles and likes being able to highlight / annotate them better on paper. And, the portability would suffer going up to a 17" screen.
Thanks in advance for any help!
Out of 582GB of available storage, she has only used about 73GB since doing a system recovery just before starting last semester. So, I'm thinking something with a 256GB SSD would prove to be sufficient (flash drives seem to be pretty large and cheap, so if worse came to worse, we could add 128gb of storage for like $50). She like to keep the screen size at 15" or under.
I've been out of the PC hardware scene for so long, I really don't know much about what to suggest. So, I figured that I'd ask here for any suggestions while we are in the research stage. She'd like to make the purchase before January 9th. Any thoughts?
1) Who makes a good laptop nowadays? Is HP still good? Is a Mac out of the question?
2) What specs should we set for CPU, Mem, etc? (Nothing less than an i5? At least 12GB of ram?, etc...)
3) Anyone here have any specifics things that should be considered for a law student? IE: I asked about a larger screen to make it easier to read, but she usually prints out longer articles and likes being able to highlight / annotate them better on paper. And, the portability would suffer going up to a 17" screen.
Thanks in advance for any help!