Find out what it will take to run your school's online class interfaces. Most schools post their requirements on their distance learning site/portal. Then find one in your budget that hits all or most of the points that you require in a laptop. Though, I would get at least 500 gig hard drive and 4 gigs of ram, if you can afford it. Sacrifice hard drive for ram if the price is not what you want, you can always save stuff to a flash drive/ thumb drive if you need to. Just make sure you can run all your software.
Though, if it doesn't have enough ram to begin with in your price range, find out if you can add to it at some point, it may be cheaper that way. Ram is cheap, lately. Also, make sure it has a cd/dvd drive, some of the smaller, more affordable ones don't come with it anymore. My roommate just found a great 14" Asus with all the bells and whistles for under a $1000 at Office Depot. She had to add office software, but that's pretty standard. Now that you are a student, if you have a student ID, you should be able to get Window's Office at your school store for a student price.
What ever you do, don't get or install the paid virus software, even if you get a free year when you purchase your computer. I never had so many problems with my computer as when it was using McAfee. I use AVG free for virus and Zone Alarm free for firewall (read the fine print when installing however or it will hijack your web browser and only use zone alarm or avg search home page and place a lot of tool bars on your web browser. But, if you read before you click while loading, you should find it and avoid that hassle.
Also, make sure you do your security and software updates regularly. Maintenance is important to keep things running smoothly. When people start having a buggy system, it is usually that a lot of updates haven't been done. (from my dad, the IBM computer fix-it guru.)
Iolo has great tools for buggy systems if anyone needs them. System Mechanic, System Recover and Search and Recover. Search and Recover is brilliant. If you accidentally erase a smart media or flash card, this will get the files back 9x out of 10 unless the file has been written over. I've used it several times. The data is still there, it's just had a file designator added to tell the system it's okay to write over it. This finds all your files on a card. Awesome!! Yay computer forensic class for teaching me that one!
Anyway, sorry for the verbal/typed monologue! lol!
LA
