Mini Laptop Computers For College

Mini laptop computers and laptops can be combined for college students. Portable mini laptops go everywhere; the bigger laptop stays in the dorm.

If the Gateway MD7826u, was still available, a 12 or 13 inch laptop with close to as good performance as that laptop will cost $1300 or more. You can buy this laptop and a mini laptop for $200 less than the 12 or 13 inch. This way people can have both laptops- A regular laptop that will do more than the ultra portable, and also even more portable mini laptops than ultraportable laptops.

There are pros and cons to this planning to get both. The pros are pretty obvious. You end up with a computer you can take around with you if you want to, that will do everything you want well, and a net book that you can take anywhere really easily and do what you are doing with your computer 90% of the time.

The cons are a matter of degree. You can't play an upper end game on a mini laptop. I don't see that as a big deal. Until you get well up there in price, you can't play them well on a 12 or 13 inch laptop. I'd be afraid that a laptop that small, with a graphics card good enough to play them well, would melt. That could just be my $1300 paper weight talking, though.

There is no linux version of i-tunes. This means XP. I'm working on a Vista machine right now so I can't easily check, but I remember XP and Office Professional being just about 16 G.B. on my desktop. Mini laptop computers running XP and Office will need more than the minimal 8 or 16 G.B. solid state drives that have been a selling point with them. The cheapest are the portable mini laptops with 160 G.B. hard drives. I figured that in though, when I said you could save several hundred dollars with mini laptop computers/laptop computers combinations.

The biggest negative is no cd/dvd player/burner. For an extra $75 to $100 dollars you can get an external burner. For an extra $300 to $600 you can get something like a Sony Vaio mini laptop that has an internal dvd/cd burner. Both choices sort of ruin the plan though. With the internal, the combination will cost more than a decent ultra portable (still be better though). With the external drive, you lose some portability. The ones I've seen aren't inconveniently large, but still a pain. You keep most of the savings though.

Connecting the two computers together as a network isn't any harder than connecting either of the computers to a network. The key though is getting the primary (clunker) computer at a good price.

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