I am buying a laptop for my college freshman -- what should I look for?

I am partial to Dell, because they have one of the best service departments/contracts in the business. I would recommend that you stay away from their credit purchase department, though - pay cash even if you need to borrow it from somewhere else.

Anyway, you need to look for 2 main things - memory, also known as RAM for Random Access Memory, and hard drive space, also known as HDD for Hard Disk Drive. Generally, my recommendation would be 1 GB (gigabytes) of RAM (which is actually 1024 MB, or megabytes). You could get away with less (512 MB) if there are financial considerations, but this should be the last thing you skimp on. As far as HDD capacity, I would recommend 60 GB, although you could drop this to 40 GB and still not be in bad shape (I am assuming that we are looking at primarily scholastic applications, not downloading movies or music) as far as space.

Think of a hard drive as a bookshelf, and memory as desk space. The bookshelf is where you store information, and the desk is where you do your work. When you sit down to work, you start with a clean desk, then go to the bookcase to get whatever you want to work on - letters, pictures, magazines, whatever. If you are looking at a picture and writing a letter, if you want to open a magazine, you may have to put either the picture or the letter back, depending on how big your desk is, because you cannot cover anything on your desk -- you cannot put the magazine on top of the picture. If you want to open a newspaper, you may need to put everything back. You may not even be able to open the whole newspaper if you do not have enough desk space. The bigger your desktop, the more information you can work on at one time. The bigger your desktop, the more things you can have open at one time - you can see three pictures, two letters, a magazine, listen to a CD and play Tic-Tac-Toe all at one time, if it is big enough. That is the way it is with RAM - the more you have, the more you can do, or the bigger and more complex the program(s) you can run. Now the same is true with your storage space. The bigger the bookshelf, the more information you can store permanently. Once you finish working for the day, you have to clean off your desktop. That is what happens when you turn off your computer - you clear out your RAM, and you lose whatever you were working on unless you "saved" it to the hard drive, which is like putting it on the bookshelf.

You can think of processor speed as you brain capacity, or your raw intelligence (remember we are speaking in loose analogies, here). Unless you are a rocket scientist, anything over a certain IQ is wasted. How much intelligence do you need to write a letter or listen to a song or look at a newspaper? Same with processor speed. How much speed do you need to type a Word document, or playback a CD or a DVD, or watch a video clip online, or run a basic physics modeling software package? So you do not have to buy the Pentium Core 2 Quad processor.

Everything else is more or less frills. If you are going to play games or do video editing, you need an upgraded video card and maybe sound card, and maybe a little more RAM. If you are going to download movies or video clips, you may need a little bigger HDD. If you want to print, you need a printer. If you want to attach a lot of peripherals (mouse, full-size keyboard, printer, etc) you may want to buy a docking station, and so on. You also may want to consider an extra battery as a fairly high priority, and maybe even a spare power supply. What I have talked about are your basics, which will determine the workload capacity of your laptop.

Good luck, and remember -

You can lose your love, you can lose your money, you can lose your home, you can lose your beauty, you can even lose your mind... but once you get your education, it is yours forever! (I just made that up, but it is the truth)

One more thing....get a GOOD one! It is not practical to think it should only last 4 years! It should be good enough to last at least 4 years and a year or two more. The school will have minimums, do not buy just that! Expand the memory to more and make the cpu faster too. External harddrives will cover most of their needs but do not buy one less than 80 gig. Also buy the larger battery. Think backpack too, they need to get it from class to class safely.

make sure it can play first person shooters like quake, maybe even a MMORPG like world of warcraft, because when i went to visit my friends in college, thats about all the compys were used for.. hah. Really though, get dual core processor, large hard drive, dvd rom, and at least a gigabyte of ram. Depending on the major, they might need a good 3d graphic processor (if they work with CAD or such programs).

depends on what your college freshman's major/interests are in...the basics he/she will need are word processing/spreadsheet/presentation programs (i.e. Microsoft Office / Open source programs, like linux, work just as good)

a CD/DVD player-- CD burner at least (DVD burner optional)

Also, get him/her a flash memory stick---1G would be nice, but 512MB would do too

Check with the school to see what limitations they might have. They might also have a recommended minimum requirements for a computer.