5 budget all-in-one PCs for college students: We name the best values

Laptops are awesome. They’re convenient, portable, and relatively powerful: the perfect combination for college. But sometimes you just want the comfort of a display, a full-sized keyboard and mouse, and speakers that don’t make every singer sound like a screaming banshee.

Well, you have two choices: You can get a traditional desktop computer and a stand-alone display and speakers, or you can buy an all-in-one that integrates the computer, display, and speakers into a single chassis. A desktop might cost a little less (don’t forget to factor in the price of a display and speakers), but it won’t move well. All those internal components can be jarred loose in transit, creating major troubleshooting headaches every time you set it up in your next domicile. And if you’re a typical college kid, you’ll be moving—again and again—for the next several years.

Do you really have room for a box this size, plus a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and a pair of speakers? If the answer is yes, do you want to cart all that stuff with you every time you move?

Fortunately, all-in-ones have become more powerful and dropped in price over the past several years. The five all-in-ones we’ve gathered here are perfect for college students: They have large touchscreens, good speakers, solid media editing and encoding capabilities, and big hard drives. Those are features you’ll be thankful for when finals—and parties—come around.

All-in-one PCs just make more sense—even if your dorm room will never ever be featured in an issue of Architectural Digest.

Each of these computers can easily handle productivity tasks—word processing, number crunching, and Web surfing—without breaking a sweat, but they can also deliver excellent audio and video experiences when you’re ready to relax. Yes, there are more powerful AIOs on the market, and the ones we’ve picked might not be the best choice for graphic design or media-production majors, but any one of them will help you manage your school work and watch Netflix.

Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13
(Reference)HP Pavilion TouchSmart
23-f260xt

I used several criteria to evaluate these all-in-ones, including benchmark performance, multimedia experience, storage capacity, touchscreen quality, overall attractiveness, and price. Each model is based on a third-generation Intel Core processor, but no two have the same CPU. PCWorld uses a Core i5-powered Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13 as its desktop PC performance baseline.

It’s true that the cloud offers almost limitless storage, but wouldn’t you feel more comfortable keeping your school projects, photos, and videos close at hand, just in case? Keep a backup in the cloud, by all means, but all of these machines provide plenty of local storage. Each of the computers I evaluated came with a 1TB, 7200 rpm hard drive. An SSD—or at least an SSD cache—would deliver even better performance, but that’s a feature you won’t find in this price range.

Acer Aspire A5600U-UB13
(Reference)HP Pavilion TouchSmart
23-f260xt

As with budget notebooks, budget all-in-ones have limited graphics capabilities. None of the AIOs in this roundup, for instance, has a discrete video card, which means none of them excel at graphics-heavy tasks such as video editing and hard-core gaming. That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to play any games, but you will need to make some resolution and image-quality concessions.

All five of these computers have big, bright, 20- to 23-inch touchscreens. Some are better than others, but none of them are poor. You’ll have no problem watching movies, juggling multiple windows, and tapping your way through Windows 8 on any of them.

Your computer will inevitably become the focal point of your dorm room, so industrial design is an important consideration. Unfortunately, some PC-makers have become so obsessed with looks that they’ve sacrificed usability. The sleek, ultra-modern keyboards and mice that come with some of these systems are beautiful to look at, but not all that comfortable to use. I also encountered I/O ports in locations that were difficult to access.

Each of these all-in-ones has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are prettier, some are more powerful, but each has something unique to offer. Once you’ve decided where your priorities lie, you’ll have a gorgeous AIO sitting on your desk in no time.

If you like HP’s picture frame design, but you’d prefer something a bit more polished, the Acer Aspire Z3-605-UR22 ($900 as of 8/29/13) is another AIO with a space-saving chassis. The Z3-605 sports an Intel i3-3227U processor; 4GB of DDR3/1600 RAM; and a 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive. It has integrated Bluetooth and Wi-Fi adapters, a 23-inch touchscreen with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and a wireless mouse and keyboard.

Acer had the best budget notebook in our earlier roundup, but its inexpensive all-in-one offering leaves us cold.

The Aspire Z3-605-UR22 has a frame design similar to the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 23, with a glossy edge-to-edge glass display surrounded by a frame that extends past the bottom of the screen to rest on your desktop. The screen is propped up by an easel-like stand that’s very easy to adjust thanks to a spring-loaded hinge.

Unlike the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 23, the Aspire only has one slim bezel under glass. This gives the machine a much more minimalist and streamlined look, though it is slightly disrupted by the system’s convenience ports. Instead of being located neatly on the side of the machine or out of sight on the rear panel, the Z3-605’s convenience ports—a card reader, a USB 3.0 port, and headphone and microphone jacks—are located right up front, just below the display. The placement sounds convenient, until you plug in an external drive or a headset and end up with cables draped over your keyboard.

Performance-wise, the Aspire is the weakest AIO of this bunch. It scored just 89 in our Desktop WorldBench 8.1 test, which means it’s 11 percent slower than our baseline (which happens to be its sibling, Acer’s Aspire A5600U-UB13). That also puts it 20 points behind the second-to-last contender, Dell’s Inspiron One 20. The Aspire won’t have any problem with basic productivity apps, and it will stream HD video, but you might have trouble when you try to multitask.

PCWorld's Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite measures performance with a number of productivity, creation, and entertainment programs.

The Aspire Z3-605-UR22 also delivered an appallingly low score with our suite of media editing and encoding tests (it finished last, and by a very wide margin), so we were surprised that it performed as well as it did in our gaming tests. This AIO managed to produce Dirt Showdown at 33.2 frames per second, and BioShock Infinite at 21.0 frames per second (both games set to a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, with visual quality set to Low). It’s no gaming powerhouse, but it performed better than most of the PCs in this roundup.

The Aspire Z3-605 does have one of the better-looking touchscreens in our roundup. Its glossy 23-inch touchscreen offers 10-finger multitouch with smooth, accurate gestures; bright, vibrant colors; and crisp, clear text. The only minor issues I saw during my testing was some minor artifacting—even in still or nearly-still images—and softening of details in photos and film. In some shots, people looked a bit featureless and oversaturated.

The Z3-605 has very nice wireless peripherals. Its keyboard is soft and noiseless but still comfortable and easy to type on, and its mouse is just the right size and ergonomically curved to fit your hand. While these peripherals aren’t as striking as the Toshiba’s silver-accented ones, they are far more usable and comfortable.

Pros

Comfortable mouse and keyboardSlim, space-saving designQuick startup time

Cons

Weak performanceOversaturated displayPoor price/performance ratio  

Bottom line

Acer's Aspire Z3-605-UR22 is an attractive machine, but its performance leaves us wanting.

Rating

2 stars

I’m a big fan of Dell’s Inspiron One lineup of all-in-one PCs. These computers manage to be gorgeous, sturdy, and versatile while remaining relatively budget friendly. The Inspiron One 20 reviewed here has a smaller display than the Toshiba, but it costs more than $300 cheaper ($699 as of 8/29/13). It’s equipped with an Intel Core i3-3240T processor; 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory; and a 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive. It also has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi adapters, and a 20-inch capacitive touchscreen.

Design-wise, the Inspiron One 20 Touch is tough to beat, though the Toshiba PX35t-A2210 has a slightly more premium look. This all-black AIO features an edge-to-edge glass screen, which gives it a bezel-less appearance and also makes for easy swiping when performing common Windows 8 gestures (such as swiping from the side to pull up the charms bar). The minimalist bezel sports a small, mirrored Dell logo at the bottom and a built-in webcam at the top. The system’s speakers are just below the screen. There are no buttons or ports on the front of the One 20 Touch, these are all relegated to the system’s sides and back.

Dell's Inspiron One 20 Touch boasts a great design, but its performance leaves a bit to be desired.

The One 20 Touch’s great-looking design is slightly marred by its below-average peripherals. The system comes with a wired mouse and keyboard, both of which are utterly basic (though mostly comfortable to use). The keyboard offers very light tactile feedback, which can make accurate typing difficult. The mouse is large but comfortable, and offers an average input experience.

As for performance, the Inspiron One 20 Touch is good, but not great. It will get you through schoolwork and basic entertainment, such as streaming HD movies and playing music, but it won’t handle PC games or media-editing software very well. This Inspiron scores a very average 109 on WorldBench 8.1, which means it’s just nine percent faster than our Acer baseline model . Compared with the other AIOs in this roundup, the One 20 Touch is solidly in the middle – it comes in fourth, but it’s just one point below our third-ranked HP Pavilion TouchSmart 23 (110).

In our graphics tests, the One 20 Touch performed as expected: It managed a playable, if far from excellent, 30.7 frames per second on our Dirt Showdown test, and but only 14.8 fps with the more demanding BioShock Infinite (with both games, resolution was set to 1024 by 768 pixels, and image quality was set to Low). In other words, it can handle low-end PC games at an acceptable frame rate, but it’s about as far from a gaming powerhouse as a Commodore 64. HD video looks just okay—there’s quite a bit of artifacting and foreign objects in scenes with a medium amount of motion—and skin tones have a tendency to look burnt and oversaturated. Audio is also somewhat disappointing: The speakers aren’t very loud, and music lacks depth, even when all the software enhancements are turned on.

This chart indicates how well each all-in-one PC performed with a variety of media editing and encoding tasks. If this is an important consideration for your,the PCs with the shorter bars are your best choices. 

The Dell Inspiron One 20 Touch is a nice starter machine for those who like the Inspiron One look and feel. The touchscreen remains one of the better touchscreens that I’ve used, with smooth, accurate touch and a nice glidey feel to the glossy display. I especially like the adjustable stand, the minimalist design, and the overall sturdiness of the chassis. But it has its issues, including cheap, basic peripherals; mediocre performance; and weak speakers.

Pros

Attractive, sturdy designAccurate, smooth touchscreenMinimalist bezel/face

Cons

Mediocre performanceLow-volume speakers with little depthVery basic, wired peripherals

Bottom line

The Dell Inspiron One is a sturdy, no-nonsense all-in-one. But Dell's ho-hum component choices deliver equally ho-hum benchmark performance.

Rating

3.5 stars

On the next page: Reviews of HP's Pavilion TouchSmart 23, Lenovo's C540 Touch, and Toshiba's PX35t-A2210

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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5 budget laptops for college students: We name the best

So you’re heading back to school and you need a new laptop—but you didn’t manage your finances over the summer. Your bank account is nearly tapped out, and you still need to buy text books and lay in enough ramen noodles to last through the winter.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. Fortunately, Moore’s Law is still in play, so today’s budget notebook is yesterday’s workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop can handle the gamut of productivity chores—word processing, number crunching, email, and the like—but all of the machines in this roundup can also tackle media editing and encoding sessions, and deliver respectable entertainment experiences.

To strike the best balance between performance and affordability, I gathered the top five notebooks I could find for $650 or less. Benchmark busters they’re not, but they aren’t budget busters, either.

Asus VivoBook S550CA (Reference)500GB 5400-rpm
(+24GB cache)HP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e000Toshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

I used several criteria to evaluate these laptops, including benchmark performance, storage capacity, weight, battery life, and (of course) price. Three of the laptops use Intel CPUs and two are AMD-based, but no two machines use the same CPU. And though Intel’s Haswell family has been justly lauded for its conservative power consumption, the one entry in this roundup equipped with a fourth-generation Core processor finished third in our battery rundown test.

When you’re shopping in this price category, you can expect to make some trade-offs. If carry weight is your primary consideration, for example, you’ll have to sacrifice display size. The lightest notebook I looked at weighs 2 pounds less than the heaviest, but it also has the smallest screen: 11.6 inches. On the other hand, all five models here deliver the same native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels, and each has an HDMI output for connecting to an external display or a TV. Four of the five notebooks come with Windows 8 installed, but only three of them have touchscreens.

Asus VivoBook S550CA (Reference)15.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch15.6 inches, 1366 by 768 nontouch13.0 inches, 1366 by 768 nontouchHP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e00011.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch14.0 inches, 1366 by 768 touchToshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A525315.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch

You should consider relying on the cloud or on an external hard drive if you need a lot of storage, since most laptops in this price range have smallish hard drives (and none of the ones I looked at for this story have a solid-state drive). The two models with drives bigger than 500GB are also the heaviest and most expensive in the group.

You won’t have to make too many compromises on connectivity, however: Each of the five laptops has at least one speedy USB 3.0 port, and all have both 802.11n Wi-Fi adapters and hardwired ethernet connections for networking. Even so, some models had better networking options than others.

Now all you have to do is decide out which laptop fits your needs best.

For general use, Acer’s Aspire E1 is the clear winner in this roundup. Acer crams a lot of value into this laptop’s $580 price tag, including a Haswell-class CPU (Intel’s 1.6GHz Core i5-4200U) and a 15.6-inch LED-backlit display with native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels.

Though Acer uses quite a bit of plastic in the Aspire E1’s design, you won’t be ashamed to pull the notebook out of your bag. A smooth finish and rich color—Acer calls it Clarinet Black—make the 1-inch-thick machine very attractive.

AcerThe Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 is the easy winner of this roundup.

The chassis and lid, on the other hand, exhibit quite a bit of flex, so you won’t want to subject this machine to rough handling. The upside to all the plastic is low weight: At 4.6 pounds, this laptop has an advantage of more than 1 pound over the other 15.6-inch models I looked at, and it weighs just over a pound more than the ones with smaller displays.

Capitalizing on the display’s generous size, Acer includes a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad on the Aspire E1’s deck. I expected the island-style keyboard to be somewhat flimsy, but I was pleasantly surprised by its solid tactile feedback. It’s not backlit and it’s a trifle noisy, but I have no complaints about how it felt under my fingertips.

The Aspire E1’s display is plenty bright, producing vivid photos and videos, but off-axis viewing is merely adequate. Acer also shaved a few bucks off the Aspire E1’s asking price by not including a touchscreen, but its highly responsive trackpad supports several Windows 8 gestures, including two-finger scrolling, zoom, rotate, and flip. You can also slide in from the right to open the charm bar, and slide in from the left to switch between applications.

The trackpad, which has a wide bar at its base that provides both right and left mouse-button functions, is off center in relation to the display, but dead center to the keyboard. It looks a little odd until you lay your hands on the keyboard’s home row.

The Aspire E1 has only 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory, but you can open it up and pop in a second module to double that amount to 8GB. Storage takes the form of a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive. There’s no SSD, to handle cache or anything else, and I noticed what appears to be an empty bay where an optical drive might go.

Benchmark performance

Acer’s machine delivered a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 177, the best of the group by a wide margin. It also outperformed our reference platform, an Asus VivoBook S550CA, which has both an SSD and a touchscreen (but costs more than any of the systems reviewed here). Diving into the individual components in our test suite, the Acer performed better than the rest of the field in the PCMark Productivity suite, but Lenovo’s IdeaPad Z400, which has a larger and faster hard drive, handled our collection of media editing and encoding tasks better.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

All work and no play makes for a boring lifestyle, but you’ll want to stick with casual games on this computer. We dialed BioShock Infinite’s resolution down to 1024 by 768 and its image quality to Low, and Acer’s laptop still managed to render the game at no better than a sluggish 25 frames per second. Intel has made strides with its integrated graphics, but its Intel HD Graphics 4400 still isn’t up to snuff for hardcore gaming. Even so, its gaming score beat everything else in the field (aside from our reference notebook).

Connectivity and conclusion

The Aspire E1-572-6870 offers a gigabit ethernet connection for occasions when you can plug into a network, and a Qualcomm Atheros AR956x dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter for times when you can’t. The laptop also has a Bluetooth 4.0 + HS adapter to support theoretical data-transfer speeds of up to 24 mbps, though the only good application I’ve ever found for Bluetooth is streaming audio).

Acer provides an HDMI-out for connecting the computer to digital displays and TVs, and a VGA output for older monitors and video projectors (the latter could come in very handy in classrooms and conference rooms, which tend to have vintage equipment). The system also has three USB ports, but only one of them is USB 3.0. The included memory card reader supports only SD Card.

i enjoyed using Acer’s Aspire E1-572-6870. The machine is blessedly quiet, and it delivered a respectable 4 hours of battery life (middle-of-the-pack performance in this roundup).

Pros

Haswell-class CPUBright 15.6-inch displayRelatively lightweightDual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter

Cons

No touchscreenLots of flex in the chassis and lidJust one USB 3.0 port

Bottom line

You won’t get everything in a 15.6-inch notebook priced below $600, but Acer made nearly all the right compromises to get to that price point.

Rating

4 stars

If someone tells you “Dude! You’re gettin’ a Dell!” in reference to the Latitude 3330, run away. Dell makes plenty of good computers, but this isn’t one of them.

Admittedly, the Latitude 3330 didn’t burst into flames or poke anyone’s eye out during our testing. But you have many better choices in the same price range. Though one of the five budget notebooks in this roundup (HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000) delivered even lower performance than this one—probably because it has an even less powerful CPU than the Dell’s 1.5GHz Intel Core i3-2375m—the HP also costs $110 less than the Latitude 3330 and has a ten-point touchscreen. The Dell’s 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display doesn’t support touch, though its trackpad does support simple gestures such as two-finger scrolling.

ROBERT CARDINDell’s Latitude 3330 doesn't deliver the performance its price tag warrants.

The Latitude has only 4GB of DDR/1600 memory, but an open and readily accessible slot accommodates a second module to double its memory. Its puny 320GB, 5400-rpm hard drive is similarly easy to access and upgrade. And this is one of only two notebooks in our roundup to include a removable and upgradable battery (the other one again being the HP Pavilion).

One component that won’t be easy to swap out is the Dell Wireless 1504 single-band (2.4GHz), 1x1, 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, which delivers a physical link rate of just 150 megabits per second. The laptop doesn’t provide Bluetooth support, either. But it does have a gigabit ethernet interface.

Unlike most of the notebooks in this price range, the Latitude 3330’s chassis contains some aluminum elements that render it considerably more rigid than the other machines we looked at. The lid, on the other hand, is rather flimsy, and the display inside doesn’t feature edge-to-edge glass, as most of the others do.

The PCMark 7 Productivity element of our benchmark suite evaluates a system's performance with everyday office tasks.

The Latitude 3330’s display isn’t wide enough to accommodate a deck with both a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad, but the system’s arrow keys are full-size and not easily mistaken for anything else. Apart from not being backlit, the island-style keyboard is well designed and a joy to type on, delivering firm but springy tactile feedback. The Function keys in the top row play their traditional roles, so you’ll need to hold down the Fn key and tap them to access their alternative assignments, such as controlling a media player.

Benchmark performance

The Latitude 3330 tied for dead last in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark. Its overall score of 64 was more than 35 percent slower than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA. Drilling down into some of the individual benchmarks from that suite, I note that the Dell finished next to last in the PCMark7 Productivity benchmark and the BioShock Infinite test, beating out only the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000.

Connectivity and conclusion

Dell broke the pattern of Intel-powered laptops providing only one USB 3.0 port. The Latitude 330 boasts two, plus one USB 2.0 port that can charge a device whether the computer is awake or asleep. It doesn’t have an optical drive, but its media card reader supports both SD and MMC media.

ROBERT CARDINThe Dell Latitude 3330 is one of the lighter laptops we evaluated.

Dell follows the crowd by providing HDMI and VGA video outputs. Because the Latitude’s Wi-Fi adapter isn’t an Intel model, the system doesn’t support Intel’s WiDi wireless media-streaming. If your primary concern is long battery life, however, be aware that this machine turned in a first-place finish, running for 5 hours, 13 minutes. And you can quickly pull out a run-down battery and snap in a fresh one to double the laptop’s useful life. But that’s one of the system’s few truly bright spots.

Note: We also reviewed this model as a small-business laptop. You can read that review here.

Pros

Easily upgradable memory, battery, and hard driveSolid construction

Cons

Lousy benchmark performanceNo touchscreenWeak Wi-Fi adapter

Bottom line

Dell’s Latitude 3330 delivers very good battery life—but little else to recommend it at this price.

Rating

2 stars

HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks we’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the slowest, finishing dead last on nearly every criterion in our five-system roundup except two important ones: weight and battery life.

Despite carrying a price tag of just $410, this Pavilion has a touchscreen. It measures just 11.6 inches, but delivers ten-point touch and the same 1366-by-768-pixel resolution as the other budget notebooks we looked at. Once you get over its diminutive size, you realize that the display is actually pretty good. Though it has a minor issue with vertical off-axis viewing, it’s much better than the screen on the Toshiba T Satellite L55Dt-A5253. Augmenting the Pavilion’s touchscreen is a trackpad that supports Windows 8 gestures such as two-finger scrolling, zoom, and rotate. Mechanical right and left mouse buttons are situated beneath the pad.

HPThe HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is a very inexpensive touchscreen laptop.

Apart from its small size, the Pavilion doesn’t look like a cheap PC. Though its case is composed almost entirely of plastic, the finishes on the lid and chassis are dead ringers for brushed aluminum, and the computer feels very sturdy despite being just 0.86 inch thick. Although this laptop was one of the lightest we considered for our roundup, its 3.4-pound heft is not especially impressive for its overall size.

As you might expect, the most powerful notebooks also had the shortest battery life.

If you have large fingers, you won’t like the reduced size of the Pavilion’s non-backlit keyboard. The keys are only slightly smaller than average, but the difference drove me crazy during touch-typing sessions. The laptop is too small to accommodate a numeric keypad, too—and I loathe its arrow keys’ design. Rather than laying them out in the familiar inverted T formation, HP made the right and left keys oversize, and the up and down keys half-size—and bookended by the other two.

The Fn keys have common tasks (such as volume and media player control) assigned to them by default, so you don’t have to hold down a second key to use them for those purposes. Speaking of media, the Pavilion has surprisingly good speakers, augmented by DTS Sound+ audio-processing software.

Benchmark performance

Egad, is this computer ever slow! Much of the blame can be laid at the 1GHz AMD A4-1250 processor that runs the show. This is paired with 4GB of DDR3/1333 memory, which HP says is upgradeable to 8GB. But since the machine has only one DIMM slot, you’ll need to toss the existing 4GB DIMM to do so (unless you buy the 8GB version at the outset). Our review model came with a 500GB hard-drive upgrade (the stock machine packs a 320GB hard drive), but both drives spin their platters at an unhurried 5400 rpm. There is no SSD option available, and the only optical drive option is external.

The Pavilion TouchSmart’s pitiful Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 64 matches that of the $539 Dell Latitude 3330, but its scores on most of the other benchmarks are significantly worse than the Dell’s. For example, the Latitude earned a PCMark 7 Productivity score of 932, versus the Pavilion’s mark of 348. And the HP’s scores on our media editing and encoding tests were off-the-chart bad. On the plus side, the superior graphics processor integrated into the AMD A4 processor helped level the playing field in at least some of our gaming benchmarks.

Connectivity and conclusion

One of the ways that HP kept this computer’s price so slow was by provisioning it with cheap networking capabilities. The Realtek RTL8188EE Wi-Fi adapter is a single-band 802.11n model that supports a maximum physical link rate of just 150 mbps, and its hardwired ethernet adapter maxes out at 100 mbps.

HPHP's Pavilion TouchSmart is less than 1 inch thick, but it's rather heavy for its size.

For better wireless networking performance, you can plug an adapter into one of the Pavilion’s USB ports. It has two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, plus a multiformat media card reader. HP provides both HDMI and VGA video outputs.

The HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is tough to beat on price—you get a lot of computer for the money. Its closest rival in price—Dell’s Latitude 3330—costs $100 more, doesn’t have a touchscreen, and carries a smaller hard drive. The Dell is slightly faster and has a larger display, but I think the TouchSmart 11z is a better value in the long run.

Pros

Solid buildTouchscreenGreat battery lifeVery inexpensive

Cons

Very, very slowChintzy network connectivity optionsLess-than-optimal keyboard

Bottom line

If you insist on getting a laptop with a touchscreen, HP delivers a lot of computer for very little money. But you’ll need to be patient with this one’s performance.

Rating

2.5 stars

Next up: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Z400 Touch and Toshiba’s Satellite L55Dt-A5253

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Must-have software for college students

Another summer has gone by, and students are setting off to college. When faced with the abundance of awesome tools available for students today, part of me wishes I were staking out a library carrel along with them.

If you’re lucky enough to be a student in this golden age of tech, don’t miss these great finds. Most of them are free, and all of them are bound to make the start of the new school year smoother than the last.

For college students, the old “reading, writing, and ’rithmetic” morphs into writing papers, doing basic stats, and creating presentations (and yes, still lots of reading). No matter what you’re studying or where, you’re going to have to perform these tasks from time to time. Even with student discounts, Microsoft Office Suite can cost anywhere between $80 and $140. But if you think there’s no alternative, you have a little research to do.

LibreOffice Writer includes most Microsoft Word features, including track changes and the formatting brush.

With its powerful Writer, Calc, and Impress programs, LibreOffice 4 offers a free and capable alternative to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. LibreOffice covers almost every feature you’ll find in Microsoft’s tools, and it can open and save as any Microsoft document with a minimal learning curve. LibreOffice’s free suite also includes Base (an Access alternative), Draw, and Math.

Unless you’re a real Microsoft addict, you’ll be surprised at how easily you can get used to LibreOffice. It’s available in Linux, Mac, and PC editions.

Every student knows the pain of collecting articles, managing a library, and, worst of all, creating citations. Zotero is a veteran (and free) tool that solves all these problems. Originally a Firefox add-on, Zotero has recently become available for Chrome and Safari as well as via its standalone desktop version. It works on Linux, Mac, and PC.

With Zotero’s word processor plug-in, adding citations to your papers is unbelievably easy.

Zotero makes it easy to collect research papers off the Web, attach PDFs, find relevant articles in your library, and sync it across PCs. With the help of a Microsoft Word or LibreOffice plug-in, Zotero takes the pain out of citations and bibliography, doing all the heavy lifting for you, using any of the major citation styles. Zotero helped me complete my graduate degree, and it’s a must-have tool for any higher-education student.

There’s more to your PDF library than organization and citations, though. Students and scholars alike have to skim through dozens of articles, examining figures, highlighting important parts, and adding notes of their own. Ideally, you should also be able to quickly refer back to these articles and notes.

Use the built-in reader to add highlights and comments, as well as to easily find related articles.

ReadCube is a PDF manager with a built-in PDF reader. It makes the job of finding, reading, and collecting articles a breeze. ReadCube identifies your articles, turning them into a searchable database that also includes your notes and highlights. We reviewed the PC edition, but it’s also available for Mac.

Discovering new articles is ReadCube’s forte, with powerful features such as turning all citations into links, getting quick lists of every article that cites the one you’re reading, and presenting a list of related articles you might be interested in. Google Scholar and PubMed searches are also built-in, and are better than ever before. And if you regularly need articles from Nature, ReadCube lets you buy or rent them for very affordable prices.

ReadCube makes it easy to browse your PDF library, with abstracts appearing on the right.

This fall, ReadCube promises a new and simple citation tool, cloud sync capabilities, and a tablet app. We’ll have to wait and see how these new features perform and how they enhance the ReadCube experience.

Renting articles from one publisher is nice, but it’s not enough. If you’re not affiliated with a university or don’t have access to its proxy, getting full-text versions of articles is either expensive or impossible. DeepDyve is an innovative service targeted at individuals and companies alike. It makes the process much more affordable by letting you rent articles from an ever-expanding list of thousands of journals from Auto/Biography Studies to Zoomorphology.

You can read any article available on DeepDyve for free for five minutes per day.

An abstract is not enough to judge an entire paper. A free account with DeepDyve gets you access to full-text articles for five minutes a day. If you deem an article interesting, you can pay $20 for five 30-day rentals, or $40/month for 40 monthly rentals.

DeepDyve's homepage includes your rental history, and an RSS reader for journals.

DeepDyve’s interface is friendly and easy to use, and a browser plug-in for Google Scholar tells you which articles in the results list are available for rent. Your DeepDyve personal homepage is an RSS reader of sorts, so you can use it to follow your favorite journals. Even if you are affiliated with a university, DeepDyve is a great way to preview full-text articles when you don’t have access to the proxy.

An even bigger part of every student’s life is attending lectures and taking notes. Every student knows the ever-present dilemma: listen to the lecture, or try to take notes? Sonocent Audio Notetaker ($150 for a perpetual license for Mac or PC, 30-day free trial) is an ambitious product that brings an end to this plight.

By converting audio into bars, Audio Notetaker makes it easy to attach colors, text, and images to your audio.

Audio Notetaker analyzes recorded audio to create speech bars that are easy to navigate. You can enhance these bars with colors, text, images, screenshots, slides, and PDF documents, and add text and references to boot. Audio Notetaker can record live lectures, interviews, Skype calls, and even online talks. It makes it possible to concentrate on listening while taking minimal notes, and easily go over the recorded material later.

Audio Notetaker is an innovative way to handle recordings, but the current price is a serious hit to a student’s budget. The PC edition I tried also crashed multiple times, causing me to lose my work. It’s a great tool, but not yet one on which to rely completely.

Some note-taking techniques are kludgey: printing out slide decks and writing on them, for instance, or copying and pasting images into a word processor. Notable.ac is another attempt to take on the note-taking problem—in the form of a free-to-use Web app.

Some Notable.ac notes are general, and some relate to certain spots on the slide.

Notable.ac is more than just a note-taking app. It’s a complete course platform for both students and lecturers. Once a course is created in the system, anyone can upload the course’s PDFs, Powerpoint slides, or Microsoft Word docs. The entire class can join in and either collaborate on notes or write their own private ones.

After creating a Notable.ac repository for a course, you can upload PDFs and invite your fellow students to join.

Notable.ac doesn’t currently support highlighting, but you can tie slide notes to certain points on the slide for easier reference. The lecturer panel, currently available only by request, also provides some trends and insights into the class’s behavior. Notable.ac is a great alternative to university-provided platforms, and its features can give classes a boost.

Students of human anatomy know how dizzying it gets with all those different blood vessels, bones, muscles, and nerves...and that’s without getting into the different parts of the brain, heart, and other internal organs. Zygote Body is an amazing 3D simulation of the human body, complete with every layer, organ, and vessel.

Use Zygote Body’s left slider to add or subtract layers of the human body.

Using your keyboard or mouse, you can slowly peel away or add the different parts of the human body, and learn more about them by searching for an organ or clicking the one you’re interested in. Even if you don’t study science, Zygote Body is an excellent way to get the bigger picture of the human body.

The growing abundance of original and useful studying tools makes being a student increasingly enjoyable. Don’t cheat yourself: Check out these tools and make the most of your college days.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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