If anyone is looking for a good back to school laptop or just a nice new laptop for themselves I highly recommend you check out the Sony Viao line which is onsale at Amazon right now. Any of of these models will be more than capable of getting the job done in terms of productivity but for price/performance and longevity I would recommend the models with the Core i5 it's Intel's mainstream cpu, of course if you wish you can also go for the Core i7 which is the cream of the crop, the price to performance ratio is a little bit lower than the i5 but it's faster overall.