I just bought a MacBookPro.......1000GBP

You can't go wrong with a toshiba, I'm on my second one.

The first one lasted years and I even dropped it and stomped on it and it was still perfect. Had to upgrade unfortunately otherwise would still be using it today. The one I have now is a few years old but a £1600 one so still going strong.

lol H you stomped on it? why, did it delete all your files? *g*

Dell are great in terms of being able to customise what you want, and remove components which you don't feel are that necessary, and I've found their customer service to be excellent in the past. IMO, Apples are something you either love or hate, but it's a personal preference I guess.

shani, it was an accident, was walking with it in my hands, dropped it and carried on walking...... it never deleted my files though

Definately check out Dell

Thanks again for the advice everyone! I used to have a Dell PC, may be worth looking there too.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who answered my post, especially Golfpro - your list of essentials was invaluable in making my decision. I now have a Philips laptop with 2 (count 'em!) gigabytes of RAM (and all the other stuff too). Now to get down to that transfer report

Very happy that you're happy. I would also suggest in general [as we're all financially struggling students here] that most software can be easily [freely] obtained via the torrents. Just a statement of fact.

Interesting: this "torrents" business is new to me. I just Googled it, and found that my university server is blocking access to many of these websites. Is it kosher?

Not really. Torrents are not illegal in themselves, but are often used for the downloading of copyrighted or other dubious material, hence your university blocking them.

hi!
even i plan to buy a laptop for my Phd wrok. I was planning to buy VIAO (Sony)....what do you have to say?

I think it's a worthwhile investment. It's much easier to write when you've got a decent computer to work on. Check out Golfpro's list of basic requirements on the previous page.

golfpro - are you a bit of a computer whizz? Just at the mention of VAIO - I have one. It has never played audio CDs or DVDs really well - both sound and pictures very jerky/fluttery. At first I thought something was wrong, but now I'm starting to wonder if you just can't expect good quality from laptop DVD/CD drives. I even read that it might just be the fan?! Any ideas...
Apart from that, I love my VAIO :-X - very aesthetically pleasing.

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