Best of back-to-school laptops

Dan Ackerman, Senior Editor August 29, 2008

For college students, a laptop is virtually required equipment, and even high school and grade school kids are getting in on the act. To help you pick the perfect system for your academic needs, we've gone and reviewed more than two dozen new back-to-school laptops, and picked out our favorites in four different price ranges.

For the Entry Level category, which is laptops from $600 to $700, we liked the Sony VAIO NR430 for being at the top or close to it in our performance tests and in battery life--and it's pretty decent-looking design for such a cheap laptop.

We call the $700-$800 range Budget--and in that category, the Gateway T-6836 is our pick, because it had the 64-bit version of Vista and 4GB of RAM, which helped edge out the competition in performance.

Of the laptops in the $800-$999 price range, which we're calling Mainstream, the Dell Studio 1535 was our favorite. While every other Intel-based laptop in our mainstream group uses the Core 2 Duo T5750, the Dell Studio S1535 has a faster Core 2 Duo T8100 processor, which helped it come out on top in performance, along with a healthy three hours of battery life.

In the $1,000-to-$1,500 range, which is High-End (for students, at least), you'll see mostly bigger 17-inch models, and the Gateway P-7811FX impresses, thanks to a 19x12 display, decent Centrino 2 P8400 processor, and Nvidia's high-end GeForce 9800 graphics.