Chromebooks and boxes have been hot all year and they have actually redefined computing to a degree as lots of low cost well built units are out there in abundance now.    And the $150-$200 price point is very very real right now.

Plus, folks are also realizing that getting on the net for entertainment/communications purposes is the VAST MAJORITY of what they do on a computer right now and spreadsheets and word processing are only a very very small minority of their activities.

These forces plus some direct political/police input from some very angry governments is likely going to result in Fall 2014 being a notable shifting point in computing.

So, where are you in this span of stuff right now?   Example, what part of your computing is still word processing or spreadsheet?

I work at a university.. so I have different perspective, plus I am a computer geek... I also have one in college and one in HS.

HS student- the school loans a Macbook AIR to each student. By far the most expensive single unit in my home today. Which is saying something. They use MS word on it... My son also has my old gaming PC ( window 7, 8GB RAM, quad core AMD @ 3.4)

My daughter Ole Miss (Hotty Toddy) has: Windows 7 laptop (17") that she uses for all MS office programs.. alot. But she has a Ipad because many books are available on that platform. She then has an Iphone.

My wife has a rebuilt ( by me) Dell 15" laptop with MS office that she uses alot. ( its converted to SSD)

Me: Windows 7 8-core AMD, 8 RAM, three internal HDD (1 SSD), 4 removable HDD, 3 GPU ( 2* 7850, plus 6670)
Uses- Gaming
Coin mining/folding
MS office ( 2010)
Photo manipulation
video ripping ( old family movies)
plus all the control of my own network
 OpenDNS
 CHANGEIP
  control of my QNAP NAS/server
The QNAP is a great little device ( linux)
dokuwiki
wordpress
SUGAR CRM
WEB server
Photo server (to ANY device ie my andriod phone)
Movie server
Music server
soon to be installed: security cam server
it sports 2* 2TB array: mirrored

DOA
my second Acer netbook. It seems these things blow out the sata controllers! The one I have left is running puppy linux via the SD card. But the wifi seems to be dieing.. so it headed to the trash.  

As to work: we use Canvas, whihc is happy on MAc and PC, and we use ExamSoft for testing. Examsoft will lock down a PC or MAc, but it is  very patcular about the OS. No Chrome, no "beta" releases.. just mainstream OS and software. A student is REQUIRED to have a laptop that can run Examsoft. We also have a portal ( or two) for the students. It will work with Chrome, IE up to 10, Firefox, but not Safairi.  I have all but quit doiing it, but I have used my PC to log into work. ( Teamviewer) which worked very well, but they killed that for another product, which I have not installed. I have also logged into my daughters PC to fix it.

I think we are set for the year for tech, maybe an andriod pad for the house, but its not needed. Other networked stuff:
Both BluRay players, but we dropped Netflix, the VOIP phone with Vonage.

If BluRay gets its act together, with a 100G Mdisc, I might get one for permanemt backups.. They are suppose to last 1000 years.

Lastly, work will let me get a copy of MS office 2013 for $10. I have not decided if I need that.

Schools generally just specify the file format that must be used -- assignments must be turned in using a file format and a set of formatting standards.   Teachers want plain jane font and formatting as they have to look at way too too many papers to want to see  odd fonts and colors.

Generally this is a Microsoft Word version XX document format and a set of basic font/spacing/indentation/page layout rules.

Colleges generally center around Microsoft Word for all things written.

Turn It In.com is used by many colleges as it automatically checks for gross sentence structure errors and for plagiarism.   A kid's marvelous woopied up as printed paper is turned into simple text and pre-graded for gross errors -- the instructor prints this out and then final grades it for fine structure and logical errors.   Nothing gets graded on a screen, the instructor needs a piece of paper to write their comments upon.

Kids like to scream that their printed copy wasn't like that (and sometimes it wasn't).  Adjustments are made in these cases.   And yes, Libre Office has some page formatting differences from MS word, but not indentation or spelling or logic differences.

A kid can use whatever he wants for a machine or a program, but the resulting file must meet the .doc format and the layout rules.   Actually, what prints out from Turn It In.com is what is really graded -- so the kid needs to bring home a graded paper or two and a good understanding of how that university actually really works.

The instructor speaks MS -- if you want help you had better speak MS too.

A college kid needs a relatively modern MS laptop -- a light one since they have to haul it all over the place and it gets HEAVY by the end of the day.  

Win 7 is plenty good enough -- getting too modern can actually cause trouble in a environment that still uses Win 7.   Find out what the labs are using for OS and word processor version -- it likely isn't really 100% up to date.

The bookstore sells discounted MS Word (and so does MS directly).  The IT department of the school sometimes has "free" license copies they can install for free (if they care enough and are industrious enough to do it).