As a college student myself you would be surprised how little you end up moving your laptop around I learned this after buying one frosh year. My advice is go for a desktop, you can either get simlar performance for a better price or far better performance for only slightly more. IF you have that much money to spend I would say get a desktop and if you really need something portable get a netbook. The laptops you are looking at are gunna feel like a ton of bricks and the last thing you will wnat to do is to lug it around.
This.
At first a heavy notebook won't be much. After time, and especially if you end up going all over campus, you'll start to hate carrying it. The other thing is that you'll be lugging around something pretty expensive. Forgetting your backpack somewhere or accidentally knocking it off a table can become very expensive.
You can enjoy a full-sized keyboard/mouse/monitor at your desk hooked up to an SFF gaming rig. Carry around either a $250 netbook or (for more oomph) a cheap $400-500 CULV based small notebook. Not only are these a lot smaller/lighter than the gaming notebooks, the gaming notebooks have HUGE and HEAVY power bricks that they absolutely need. Some netbooks are hitting 10 hours of battery life, so you won't even need to carry around the AC adapter. I'll go take a pic of my power bricks so you can see size differences.
For a small desktop, you can easily do a mini ITX gaming rig like this:
socket 1156 CPU of choice $90-whatever
socket 1156 ITX board $60-150
4GB RAM $90
Windows $100
decent PSU $70-whatever
optical drive $25
primary storage (HDD/SSD/whatever) $40-whatever
Lian Li PC-Q11 case $120 (other options available at various prices)
GTX 460 video card $150-240 (768MB-1GB)
monitor $150-whatever
So, for under $1000 you can have a desktop computer that will run circles around gaming notebooks twice the price.
Then, spring $250 for a netbook to carry around (or $400 for one of the premium Asus 1005 models with 10+ hours battery).
EDIT: Here's a pic of adapters I have around the house. Weights come from my postal scale, so are fairly accurate. Weights do NOT include cabling. The bigger adapters come with beefier cables, so weight and bulk will be even more.
Starting from the left, AC adapters for a...
MSI Atom netbook 45W 5oz
Hannspree SU4100 CULV 45W 12.1" notebook 5oz
Dell standard 65W (Latitude 13 SU7300 CULV, retardedly huge adapter) 16oz
Clevo (C2D, single 9800M GTS GPU) gaming notebook 120W 23oz
Clevo (C2Q, dual GTX 280M GPUs) gaming notebook 220W 32oz
The netbook has 5 hour battery life (older model). The next two CULV notebooks have 5 and 4 hours of battery life respectively. All three can probably be carried around without their bricks unless you have a number of classes all day. The gaming notebooks can NOT be carried around without the brick because they may or may not last a single class on battery.
A cheap "new" model $250 netbook usually has 6-8 hour battery life, and some of the more expensive Asus netbooks (1001P, 1005HE) can have 10-12 hours in a 3 pound package. For CULV notebooks, the Timeline/Timeline-X and Asus U/UL series (mostly starting at $600) are 8 hours or more, with really decent performance and starting under 4 pounds.