Back-to-School Laptop Deals 2011

Retailers and computer vendors in the U.S. have started offering students with back-to-school laptop deals for 2011 season, including great savings on notebooks, netbooks, and tablet computers.

Here are our choices for the best offers for mainstream, gaming, and ultraportable laptops, as well as netbooks and tablets.

Mainstream 14″, 15″, 16″, 17″ Back to School Laptop Deals:

This season full-size laptops are cheaper than ever, with prices starting at $330. For that price you can get a 15.6″ Toshiba Satellite with the AMD C-50 APU. If you add $70 more, you will be able to get a decent specced Toshiba Satellite or HP Pavilion g6t, both with the Intel Pentium B940 CPU.

In the higher-end mainstream segment, our choice is the Acer Aspire AS5750G-9639 with an Intel Core i7 CPU, a dedicated Nvidia video card (good for occasional gaming), and a $770 price tag.

Click for these and other 14″, 15″, 16″, and 17″ deals.

11-, 12-, and 13-Inch Ultraportable, Thin & Light Laptop Deals:

$400 will buy you a HP Pavilion dm1z, including the AMD E-350 processor, 3GB RAM, and a 320GB HDD and for students needing full blown performance in an ultraportable form factor there’s the 12.5″ Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with the Core i7-2620M CPU, 4GB RAM, and 320GB HDD. The X220 is a lot more expensive, but its $1,199 price is a discount from regular $1,860. For Mac lovers, the good news is a discounted price for the 2011 Macbook Air 11.6″, priced at $970 instead of $999.

Click here for our full list of ultraportable, and thin & light laptop deals.

Gaming Notebooks on Sale This Back-to-School Season

We have already mentioned that in your spare student time you can play games on a sub-$800 mainstream laptop, but they won’t run so smooth as on a real gaming notebook such as the $1,149.99 Asus G53SW with a 15.6″ screen, quad-core Intel i7 CPU, GeForce GTX 460M video card, 6GB RAM, and a 500GB HDD or the latest Toshiba Qosmio X775 with a Core i5, GTX 560M, 640GB HDD and the same RAM size and price.

Gaming notebooks that are on sale this season.

Netbook 2011 Back-to-School Deals

For a long time, netbooks rule in the budget computer segment. Although their 10-inch screen sizes and relatively low performance may be a drawback for some users, prices starting at below $250 will sure compensate for that. This back-to-school season, $240 bucks can get you an Acer Aspire One netbook with Intel’s fastest netbook CPU – the dual-core Atom N570.

Netbook deals are listed here.

Tablet PC Computer Savings

A 10.1″ multi-touch Android tablet is usually priced at more than $500, but the ViewSonic gTablet with Android 2.2 and a 1GHz CPU costs nearly 50% less.

For tablet savings, click here.

Note: This article was updated on August 1st.

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