Are you taking your desktop with you? imo having a decent desktop for gaming/editing and a portable laptop for classes or studying outside of home is the best and you won't have to spend too much for a laptop

Don't get a laptop that JUST meets your needs. If you want it to last you 3-5 years you ideally want it to still be at least decent 3-5 years from now. You won't get that with a cheap budget laptop that just barely meets your needs now. Splurge on the laptop, it will last you longer and give you letter performance the whole time. $1500 is very doable too.

You said a keyboard and a monitor as well... Are you talking about a 120hz monitor for gaming or are you just wanting extra screen space to work with? You can actually get a 120hz laptop with a 17" display (which is made for gaming obviously) and still stay within that $1500 budget. If you just wanted monitor for gaming, this will save you some money. If you want extra screen space you can still go with a 120hz laptop and pickup a cheap (but good) 60hz monitor to go with it. As for the keyboard... See the countless threads about keyboards (you can get a really nice mech kb for around $100-$120 tho).

Overall your $1500 budget is very good and you should be able to find something really nice. Tell me more about the monitor you wanted and ill try to find some good laptops for you tonight when I get off work.

Spend 1000$ on the desktop. 500 on the laptop.

He didnt mention anything about a desktop.

I'm a senior in Aerospace Engineering. I started my years at university with a Toshiba Laptop that I gamed on and used for classes. I do a decent amount of programming and I began to regret my decision to use a laptop for all my needs pretty much when I started doing real work. Playing games was just about the only thing the laptop adequately fulfilled my expectations. I had several problems with my laptop that made it less than ideal.

First, a laptop capable of playing games on is inevitably horrible at portability and battery life. They are too much of a hassle to lug around due to their size and you have to carry the cord with you everywhere because of battery life and ultimately when you do have to use them in a portable situation it isnt very good. Too hot, battery doesnt last long enough, too big.

Halfway through my sophomore year I built a desktop and started looking for a more portable laptop. I wanted excellent battery life and portability. Something that would be great for keeping with me at all times without too much hassle. It needed to run full windows so I could have at least basic functionality in regards to I ended up getting a windows 8 pc with a pen digitizer built into the screen so i could take digital notes. It is an atom pc so it isnt the most powerful but coupled with remote pc for my desktop I can do pretty much anything I want on it.

tldr: Desktop + something very portable.

What mile said about the battery is true. If you want a powerful laptop the battery life isn't going to be the greatest. A desktop and a cheap laptop would be the best option, but you need to consider 2 things.

1.) space. Do you have room for a desk + a tower/monitor?

2.) performance. If you want a decent laptop you are going to spend at least $300. leaving you with $1200 for a desktop and monitor. Figure $300 for a nice 120hz... Now you are at $900 for a system and that's not very much. Even with a cheaper 60hz monitor... Maybe $950 for a total PC build... It's not going to be the best.

Considering the budget you are working with I would seriously suggest getting a really nice gaming laptop (which will run any program you can throw at it). I have a Toshiba Qosmio gaming laptop that I use for LANs, and while it's not small, it's totally manageable. As mile and I both said, the battery life isn't great, but it's not horrible (just work in power saver or Eco mode when not plugged in). With mine I have it in a laptop backpack and I also have room for all of the following:

Charger
Mouse
Mousepad
Cooling mat
Keyboard
External HDD
Earbuds
Microphone
Extra mouse
Phone charger
Laptop lock
Other small misc items

Again, even with a large 17" gaming laptop in my bag, all of that stuff also fits.

Something big enough to use a lot but not too big you can't put it on an inevitably small college desk. Most schools have a computing services department, and it's nice to have a model that they can fix if it breaks (unless doing that yourself is your kind of thing). I like a lot of the new HP pavilion laptops, they've got a lot of processing power at a good price.

Small college desk = laptop ;)

ive used a desktop on a "small college desk" for 2 years. Its not bad. A high powered gaming laptop will be high powered enough to run everything you want to be sure but i still think it is the wrong way to go

Hmm, I hadn't thought about any of that. I don't want to drop a lot of money on a 120 hz monitor, I play with one at home but only get 40 fps anyway, I'd rather save there. If I did go with both a laptop and a desktop, then I'd definitely want something cheap for the laptop. For anyone already in college, especially engineering majors, will I need to do much with it besides word processing and maybe some compiling while I'm away from the desk? The desks in my dorms do appear to be a decent enough size where I could have a desktop.
Also, if I had to I would not be absolutely opposed to spending 2000, I did get a nice scholarship package.

What I do is use my desktop for all my heavy computing, CAD and programming. If I need to do something on the go I can do all my programming stuff on my cheap laptop as long as its not super intensive, and if it is I can remote desktop onto my desktop pc from my laptop and just run stuff remotely from my "laptop" on the desktop. Some programs just wont run on my laptop namely SolidWorks which for some reason isnt compatible with Windows 8 32 bit which i then just remote desktop to my desktop pc. Coupled with a file service like dropbox for school files and stuff this works pretty seemlessly though. One of the main things I use my laptop for is all my ebooks which i admittedly torrent and save some money there. Otherwise I use it sparingly for small tasks and taking notes in class. Otherwise you are looking at $400 a semester for books sometimes. Word and other Microsoft Office programs generally work well on low end laptops anyways, so you dont really have many issues. Like i said i have an active digitizer which makes this possible to take engineering notes in a digital format that isnt overly complicated. Although not necessarily something you will have to do for your schooling I love using LaTeX to compile my written documents. It is great for things like technical lab reports and stuff and the files that you edit and end up with are simply plain text and pdf which is great for viewing on just about any platform.

At least at my Engineering School there are plenty of computers around campus and in the labs we work in that you could probably get by entirely without a laptop but it is handy to have in some occasions. As a computer science major i could imagine you taking some exams in class with a laptop (something i have only done once) and maybe doing interactive things in class with a laptop. Certainly you wouldnt need anything too powerful to do this.

you can get a i5 m laptop for ~$500 and a desktop that can run modest games (dota/tf2) at probably 125 constant.

even though that wouldnt be a gaming laptop, the integrated graphics on an i5 is likely good enough to meet your 40fps in tf2 requirement anyways(not 100% sure anyways)

#13 I have a second gen i7 and the integrated graphics on it is enough to get around 60fps with a good performance config.

I'm an engineering major (going into my senior year) and I've been extremely happy with my combination of ~900$ desktop (i5, 6950, 120hz monitor, some other stuff) and ~600$ laptop (i7m, integrated graphics, 15", good ssd, ~5 hours of battery if you're conservative with the brightness and stuff). Though I just recently got a good phone and found myself barely touching my laptop anymore, but I haven't been back to school yet.

I guess my suggestion would be either: get a desktop/laptop setup (but I'd still get a laptop strong enough to at least kinda play tf2) or get a laptop and get some good peripherals for it. The things I like most about my desktop are the better usage of desk space (no computer actually on your desk) better keyboard quality, and screen space. All of that is pretty doable in a laptop too as long as you plan some money for it.
And battery life is kind of a concern with the bulkier gaming laptops but modern intel+nvidia setups (and to a lesser extent amd) are getting a lot better about smart graphics switching and power gating and some other things which can make your battery life a much better when you're not doing anything demanding.