Quote Originally Posted by Crandaeolon View Post
Maybe I didn't get something (just skimmed the discussion), but why do you need a laptop, exactly? If they have computer rooms for students at Oxford, you'll probably do most of your work in those with proper keyboards, screens and mice. You should check what computer facilities are available and, if possible, ask older students and/or staff if it's practical to use such facilities.
Computer rooms for students are always singularly disappointing. Either hand-me-down desktops that do not agree with even Windows 2000; or some incomprehensible account system; or general lack tools/configuration suitable for heavy duty users plus a restrictive environment. Also there will always be too few computers and too many users. IOW: if you need to get real work done and it involves a computer, make sure you have a laptop set up to your liking and make sure you have something like a VPN client set up. Much faster, much less error prone, more storage, and much much more convenient (it also works during weekends for instance).

Really, the only reason to buy a laptop is portability. A desktop is obviously superior at everything else, and citing "replacement desktop" as a reason to buy one is not very convincing. This comes from the mouth (fingers?) of someone who made that mistake a few years ago - I bought a semi-powerful laptop just for those reasons, to replace my aged desktop and to write notes during lectures. It ended up a disaster; the laptop was too bulky to carry around all day, it didn't have the battery power to last a day's lectures, let alone a six-hour train ride across the country whenever I visited my parents. At home it barely matched the power of my old desktop, but with far inferior I/O devices.

After half a year I sold the piece of crap and upgraded my desktop. This computer (core2duo @ 3GHz, 4GB 1066 MHz RAM, NVidia 9600GT) is still powerful enough to run today's games at decent details. Getting the new parts cost me less than $500, which is less than what I got from the used laptop.

So, I guess the moral of the story is this: Think hard if you really need a portable computer.
An interesting thing as far as spending $1500,- or so on laptops/desktops go would be to combine a $400,- or so low end notebook with a $99,- 40GB SSD and say <Linux flavour of the month>. Then get yourself a $1000,- machine for playing games, and main storage. That gives you a machine designed for battery life and productivity (office etc.) with decent performance (courtesy of SSD plus lighter environment) as well as a nice budget for a machine to play moderately hardware intensive games such as M2TW equivalents.