| I'm one of the few insane students who personally built a massive PC just for the sake of college. My doctrine is that laptops will never be as powerful as desktops, especially for price, and I'd be better off investing in building a high end pc and a very cheap laptop, the laptop only for being able to work mobilly, the desktop for anything else.
As per the proc discussion, time to get technical.
I would actually support celeron for being perfect, but only in a very slim area, namely, fileservers and hosting main/sub hubs. Otherwise, Intell makes wonderful core2duos. I would never really support a quad, especially in a laptop, merely due to the fact that very few applications will actually use one, and if yours do, you probably know it already and know to ignore what I'm saying here.
If you're looking into laptops, my advice would be the EEEpc.
I can't say enough things about that machine, it is, in my eyes, beautiful. If you have any more specific questions, I'll try and answer them as best I can, computer building is something I've done as a hobby for quite a bit now.
Oh, and the OS debate... -sigh- My new box runs gentoo and XP, both 64 bit, but my secondary box is a pure mac machine. I wouldn't reccomend Wine to anyone who wants to do anything like gaming, or especially hardware reliant applications, it's... awkward, and oftentimes innefectual. I would however reccomend to NEVER go vista, and if you're looking into linux, Kubuntu is a good starting point. Other than that, it's basically your choice, you can always partition your drive after the fact to install another OS, linux and mac both play very nicely with windows but sadly not the other way around. |