You get to go to school in a week?! I had to go today. :/

ahhh school glad i'm finished with that :P i suggest HP

If it is used just for school/social stuff? Just buy a cheap one at walmart as suggested above. This should literally cost you under $500.

If you intend to play some games, but they are either not demanding or are older games, you can still probably get by with the $500 computer.

If you legitimately want it for games, I would suggest getting an Asus. Toshiba and Sony are good as well, but Asus seems to be on top for this category laptop at the moment.

If it's just for school then get a nice cheap Dell laptop.

I think an Asus laptop will get the job done.

my brother is an architecture student, so he needs to do some 3D work, he bought an asus for 1000$, it's like a yr old and no problems so far, the built quality is very good.

Get something light, so you can take it to class easily. Also, don't get one with a CD/DVD/BluRay drive, it's just added weight. If you can use the school's computers for the first term, it might be better to wait and get your laptop after Windows 8 is released. There will probably be a bunch of new hardware at that time and current laptops will be a lot cheaper.

Personally I don't spend more than $600 on a laptop anymore and just upgrade every 2-3 years.

Thanks for all the suggestions everybody I'm probably going to go with a Dell i15 it only costs $600 and it has 6 GB RAM 500 HDD and i7 processor. I was amazed at the price considering the specs.

Just not Dell. For the love of all that is good do not get a Dell!

i7 doesn't mean good. 6GB is overkill.

And it still won't play games so specs are irrelevant. Absoluetly every machine you can buy will do the web browsing, music, videos and office programs you will be running on it. If it looks too good to be true, it is.

What I'm saying is, go cheaper.

And ignore all these brand suggestions, they're all anecdotal evidence and you shouldn't pick because this one guy's HP broke once.