Most students haven’t been out of school very long for the summer. Despite that fact, it’s already time for most parents to be gearing up for back to school shopping. If you have a student, going off to college a new notebook may be on the shopping list this year. Toshiba has announced a new series of notebooks perfect for students.

The series is called the Satellite L and starts at $549.99, not much more than some netbooks. The new line includes 14-inch L510 and L515 modes, 15.6-inch L500, 16-inch L505, and a 17.3-inch L550/555 model. The laptops have many features in common like HD TruBrite screens, sleep-and-charge USB ports, and hard drives with capacities from 250GB to 500GB.

The Sony VAIO NW is the latest 15-inch notebook from Sony featuring a fairly reasonable price tag. The base price is $880 and goes up from there. This one offers a 15.5-inch widescreen HD display with 1,366 x 768 resolution and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Some other features include an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 graphics card, 4GB RAM, a 400GB hard drive, a 1.3MP webcam, Blu-ray drive, WiFi, Bluetooth, an HDMI port, 3x USB ports, an ExpressCard port, a microSD card slot, a memory stick PROTM slot and Windows Vista as the OS. You can get the VAIO NW notebook starting this month in three colors.

Yep. It’s another Hello Kitty notebook. This Hello Kitty mini laptop is from Medion and will make all of your little girl wishes come true. It features a Hello Kitty mugshot on the outside and another on the keyboard. This one is dubbed the S1211 Medion.

This kitty branded notebook comes with a $578 price tag, in your choice of white or black colors. Some other features include: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 10” TFT display, Webcam, and wireless connectivity.

The new Logitech V220 notebook mice are far out man. Normally only coming in dark gray, the three-button peripheral now comes in several psychedelic colors, including blue, pink, purple and red. But not just colors. There’s also three new patterns available.

It shares its RF-based nano USB receiver with higher-end mice like the VX Nano and you can leave the connector plugged into a notebook even when it’s in a bag. “The man” can have his boring old plain mouse. You’ll be rocking the colors and patterns of peace love and grooviness. They ship today for $30.

Summer has only just started for most students. Some students only got out of school this week. Despite that HP is already announced its back to school line up. Back to school isn’t something that students will want to think about right now, but most parents are already counting the days.

Among the offerings is the HP Pavilion dv6z Artist Edition notebook. The machine starts at $949 and includes all the features found in the dv6z plus and the machine sports the design that won the HP MTV notebook design contest.

Panasonic just announced a new 10.4-inch notebook for the Japanese market. It goes by the awkward name of “Lets Note Light” R8 CF-R8WWLAJP. The notebook features a 1.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU, 2GB of RAM upgradable up to 4GB, and a 64GB of SSD with 220MB/s reading speed.

The battery will provide up to 9-hours of use time. Some other features include Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet. If you are so inclined, you can buy the Panasonic Lets Note Light R8 CF-R8WWLAJP for $1750.

iBUYPOWER announced another brand new gaming notebook today called the M865TU and it’s 15-inches of video gaming awesomeness. You’ll have a ton of different processor options. The notebook has a starting price of $1,499 and is available in a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9800 version as well as many others. It’s also capable of up to 4GB DDR3 memory, 1,680 x 1,050 resolution on the 15.6-inch LCD display and a NVIDIA GTX 260 1GB graphics card.

As usual this offering from IBUYPOWER is custom made for gamers who want top of the line graphics and video capability. You can also get an Intel X-25-M SSD option.

There are several important factors to consider when shopping for a new notebook. One of the factors is performance, often as important if not more important than performance is the battery life of the notebook. A great notebook with poor battery life is hard for many users to enjoy.

Acer has announced that its new Timeline notebooks are now available in America. The Timeline series averages over 8 hours of battery life and prices start at $598. The TimelineAS3810T has battery life of 9 hours and 7 minutes. The machine features and Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU, 13.1-inch LED backlit LCD display, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB HDD among other features. It sells for $899.99.

It’s no surprise that Intel unveiled a bunch of new processors at Computex. The T9900, P9700, P8800, SU2700 processors and GS40 chipset. The T9900 Core 2 Duo stands out from the crowd, clocked at a fast 3.06 GHz, which makes it the first Penryn-based Core 2 Duo chip to accomplish that. The P9700 and P8800 are “performance kickers” that pack a whole lot of super-fast cache memory.

The SU2700 is aimed at ultra-thin laptops, which is where Intel predicts a “boom” this year. Decent performance and low-power is the key here.

There was once a time when buying a new notebook regardless of the brand meant that you were getting the same basic looking machine. Some notebooks were plain beige then along came the snazzy black machines. Dell was among the first notebook makers to offer consumers real color options and is still the leader in that area.

Dell announced a new laptop yesterday called the Studio 14z that packs a nice feature set into a colorful and portable package. The machine has a low starting price of $649 and comes in Black Chain Link, Midnight Blue, Spring Green, Plum Purple, Ruby Red, and Promise Pink colors. The notebook will be available internationally, but the pink color is for the U.S. only. Dell will donate $5 for each pink notebook purchased to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation.

iBUYPOWER never stands still. And today the manufacturer announced the Battalion 101 CZ-10 Premium Gaming Notebook, adding yet another high-powered option to their all-star lineup. The notebook features an Intel Montevina Core 2 Duo Mobile Dual-Core processor, an ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card, DDR3 memory and more.

The 15.6-inch WXGA widescreen LCD display features a 1,366 x 768 resolution. Some other features include 4GB memory, a 500GB hard drive and several inputs including 4-USB ports and an HDMI port, a 3-in-1 card reader, finger print scanner and 2-megapixel webcam are also included.

If you buy a typical wireless notebook mouse today, the USB adapter the thing needs can be about the size of a traditional pack of gum. That’s not so bad if you are working form a desktop that you never move, but if you are working form a notebook that you carry around the chances of breaking that big dongle are good.

A while back Logitech introduced a VX Nano cordless mouse with a tiny USB dongle to prevent damage. Verbatim has now unveiled a very similar wireless mouse called the Nano Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse. The mouse has a tiny USB dongle that only protrudes from the notebook a few millimeters.

In Europe, the practice of subsidizing notebooks and netbooks on mobile carriers is very common. In the US, the practice is still relatively unknown. RadioShack offers a netbook bundled with mobile broadband, but it is one of the few such offers in the States.

AT&T has announced that it will be expanding its subsidized netbook offer and rolling the products out to its stores nationwide. The new expanded lineup will include Acer, Dell, and Lenovo netbooks all bundled with mobile broadband plans.

I find myself really wanting to get my hands on the MSI X-Slim X400 notebook. Since I saw the X340 at CES I have thought that the slim notebook would be a good replacement for my netbook. It would be nice to have a larger keyboard and screen sometimes, plus the X-Slim machines are way cool.

MSI talked up the new X400 and X600 machines back at the beginning of the month, but offered little in the way of details on the machines. MSI got official with some more specs on the notebooks today. We already knew that the X400 would offer a 14-inch screen and the X600 would offer a 16-inch screen.

Dell was late to the netbook game by many standards, but the computer maker is now firmly in the netbook market with its Mini 10 machine. Dell also caters to notebook users looking for larger machines at a cheap price.

The Texas-based computer maker has announced new additions to its notebook and netbook lines today with two new low cost machines. The Dell Inspiron 15 is a 15.6-inch notebook with prices starting at only $399. The low-end machine gets a Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB HDD along with Windows Vista Basic. Options can greatly increase the price of the machine.