[Thermodyne]

Be very careful with a used laptop purchase. Laptops are very expensive to repair once they go out of warranty. Also, despite what you’ve heard above, Dell’s are not over priced or poorly built. Just stay away from the low end units. We purchase 10 to 15 Latitudes a month and have had only 2 out of over 200 need repairs. Sure the support is a PITA, but that goes with the territory no mater where you get it from. Apples are good laptops, but many universities don’t support them on the LAN. And with a Windows laptop you can purchase MS software dirt cheap with the student discounts at most universities. Dell and IBM are the two main line systems and Sager is prolly the premo. Compaq and Toshiba used to be real good, but have fallen to the realm of white box of late. Sony is nice hardware, but takes some getting used to. A newcomer to the top end is ASUS; they are building some real nice systems. What ever brand you pick, you want a Pentium M of at least 1.7 GHz, 512megs of ram (1Gig would be better) and do not buy integrated video. And be sure to get a tether so that you can lock it down. Word is that the lifespan of an unattended laptop at school is measured in minutes.