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laptop for university?

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est:
Man, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Vista so long as you get a decent enough laptop to run it, which is basically any laptop these days.  I've been running Vista on both my laptop and my main rig for about a year now without incident.  That isn't so much a recommendation as a refutation of people bagging it.  It isn't the same OS experience that people got at launch time.  For one thing the drivers have improved (nVidia drivers were the main cause of problems as launch), and as I said before, hardware has also improved.  Han runs Vista on a rather underpowered HP machine and doesn't have any problems with it.

Laptops are by far the most personal machine you will ever buy.  The only way to know if you can use one or not i to go try them out.  Go to Best Buy and then go into an Apple store and have a muck around with a few laptops to see how they feel.  Every laptop is slightly different, and when you have such limited space to play around with to begin with even the most minute of layout difference can increase or decrease the feel that things are in the right place (or not!)

I can't say much on the Apple front, but on the Windows side I mostly agree with bicostp's recommendation of specs.  Intel Core2Duo mobile cpu @ about 2Ghz, 2gb+ ram, and a Geforce 9300 or above graphics card will give you more than enough power to run almost anything you'll need for uni and maybe play some dvds or HD media files if you like.  For the OS you will probably get Vista Home Premium, which is the best bet for personal use.  If you are going to be lugging it around for uni you will want 15" or smaller.  My laptop is 15" and I would probably prefer it to be a bit smaller if I were to be carrying it about.

Covetous:
I was kind of against mac for quite some time but about 2 years ago I decided to challenge myself and bought a macbook pro. Can't say I regret in any way. There is a quite small mac tax on them but might be worth it to get something that’s quite good looking.

I feel that MacOS is better suited for laptops. You have quite a few functionalities that works quite well with touchpad’s. Windows haven’t really been able to copy that yet. Gaming isn't really an issue since dual boot is now a standard part of macOC X.

That’s that about Mac.

If gaming isn't your concern then focus on getting an as good CPU as possible. Ensure you get atleast 4 GB RAM and a decent size on your hard drive. Storage is easy to increase with and USB/Network disc later on but must always be able to bring whatever you’re working on. I think I heard some rumors about Adobe implementing use of the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) in Photoshop but don't know if it's done yet so don't worry about the graphics card. HP has a quite good reputation now days but I have always liked Asus laptops. But then money might actually become an issue. Dell was good some years back but I hear more and more complaints about them.
Also, consider getting two laptops. And EeePC is really nice if your planning on traveling a lot but isn't suited for any kind of real work.

Hope that helps some.


Edit: corrected my spelling. Sorry for all the errors I've missed.

Reed:
Oh, one more thing. The best time to get a laptop is a little before school starts. Typically the major manufacturers will have pretty decent sales on their laptops in anticipation of new students wanting to buy them. When I got my laptop I paid for only 2Gb of RAM, but got a free upgrade to 4Gb.

Trollstormur:
two simple rules for buying a school laptop

get something small and light

get a good warranty. pay extra, if you have to.

celticgeek:
I have been looking at laptops recently, and despite being a GNU/Linux guy, the MacBooks look pretty good. 

Also, the latest issue of Consumer Reports (June 2009) has a comparison of various laptops and netbooks, including discussions of pros and cons of the various types.  It might be worth checking this out. 

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