Get a refurbished one from the Dell website.
Same as new. Same warranty.
Sometimes refurbished just means it is out of production or someone opened a box. Could mean anything.
Next:
Buy a back up hard drive from Seagate. They are only $50-$100 bucks but will come in mighty handy if the laptop hard drives decides to spin or something fuses.
Always run Spybot and F-prot for protection against spyware, viruses and scareware.
Spybot is free but you might consider donating $5 bucks. They don’t care.
F-prot has a free version but you should purchase the commercial version. This is what ISP’s and Fortune 2000 companies use and it’s smoking.
Next, download and install Malware bytes. When the college kid picks up a virus they can wait 2-3 hours while Malware zaps that thing.
As for Word, Excel, etc. Save some big time bucks here. Order the student version of Microsoft office suite and you save big time bucks. Don’t order this if the PC you bought already has it.
If it’s me, I say go with the Dell Studio 17. It’s made for multimedia and will perform just fine for almost amything. Great prices in the Dell outlet:
http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=2201&fid=1038&fid=901&fid=1043&fid=1075
You could even go to Costco and just buy anything they offer. They will all be great.
We live in Nomansland. The nearest Costco is (I’m guessing) a 5 hr. drive. Thanks for the info.