Buying a Laptop / PC Tower - send help pls

Hey guys!

So I posted a few days ago that I had to return my school laptop so I have been laptopless for the last couple of days, and I have not yet reached a decision on what laptop I should get as the permanent replacement for the next handful of years, or however many it may last.

I wanted to ask you guys in case any of you all have any suggestions or recommendations on what I should look for! I am in dire need of a laptop ASAP, and I am also going to look for a PC tower to have at my/my parents' apartment, but this is something that I do not immediately need and most likely won't need until August. I am trying to go non-expensive with a laptop and PC tower, and looking for something that is in the $200-$300 range for each. ($200-$250 would be even better, truthfully). I primarily need a laptop and PC tower for college, so anything that can get me through that and afterwards would be great. I also, REALLY IMPORTANT, need the laptops to have an optical CD/DVD drive. Maybe it's just me but it's driving me insane finding so many good laptops without the CD/DVD drive. Would also prefer having Windows 10, although I guess that doesn't matter too much given you can just get the upgrade.

I just wanted to see if you guys had any recommendations/suggestions and could help me out in that regard! I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to some specifics with laptops/computers but I have a few options that I am currently considering, and will post those if needed.

EDIT: Should definitely mention my experiences with HP laptops have been awful, so I am incredibly reluctant to try those. Experiences with Dell and Acer have been positive, for the most part. I've never had a Lenovo or an Asus, but definitely willing to try.

for PC towers, you buy their parts separately and assemble them yourselves, they're considerably cheaper that way (my 700-800 pc would probably come at 1000+ if you bought it per-assembled). You can get parts for a good prices at http://www.newegg.com/ (sure there are other sites out there -amazon is another good one-but newegg came to mind).

I have an Acer Aspire 4.1, which works pretty well. It doesn't have a built-in DVD drive, but you could get one for probably 20 bucks off Amazon.

I got mine from this place. I set the search tool to search for Acer Aspire laptops, which are in the $250 range. I believe I got mine at approximately $325, but mine is a more premium version.

just a tip, if you do find a really good laptop/pc you can also get an external cd/dvd usb drive, heres one for $30 for example

Thank you BLOF, Roy, and tfp for your help! I kind of realized it isn't really necessary for the laptop to have the CD/DVD drive considering it won't necessarily be my main PC, so I've been looking at the "2-in-1" laptop/tablets that have become big as of late (they seem a LOT more convenient for college, as well). Has anyone had any experiences with those, by chance? I found one that I think is from Lenovo (presently don't have the URL available, it's on my mom's laptop) and have been checking into that one a bit more, but I was not sure if anyone here had any interaction with those types of PCs and if there were positive/negative opinions from those interactions. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Wondering why your experience with HP is bad. But my experience with Dell was far worse. I'm sorry I can't help you much, but if you decide a laptop model to get, make sure to research it online a bit to see if other users suffer from troubles.

Shaggy said:

Wondering why your experience with HP is bad. But my experience with Dell was far worse. I'm sorry I can't help you much, but if you decide a laptop model to get, make sure to research it online a bit to see if other users suffer from troubles.

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My high school - which was all online - sent us school laptops to use, and they first had HP laptops so that's what we got. I went through about... 5 of them in high school with all five of them having some sort of problem (constantly disconnecting from the internet and not being able to reconnect for hours was a primary one with almost all of them), along with some other problems here and there. They were all the same model, so I guess it's probably a little dumb for me to be so reluctant with HPs just because of that, but my school switched to Dell laptops my final year and they were SO much better (only ran into one constant problem with it running slowly for like an one hour interval during the evening, but even then it wasn't anywhere near as bad as what I dealt with when using the HPs).

Also, no worries, you don't have to apologize! I definitely have been trying to keep track of the same laptops site-by-site just so I get a few different angles. Still haven't decided on anything yet. Why is laptop shopping so DIFFICULT

You should get a Core i3 or Pentium Quad Core laptop. They are cheaper.