Need help choosing laptop

[Cassius105]

Hi

i know quite a lot about PCs but never really looked at laptops before so decided to ask for some advise here before proceeding

Decided to buy one for uni work

will be used mainly for coding C++/Java/OpenGL and wordprocessing

want to use linux on it but doesnt need it preinstalled, im quite capable of installing my own OS

i dont have a whole lot of money to spend max of about £700 (sorry i know this is american site but dunno how much that is in dollars)

not looking to play games or anything so im not looking for anything uber

just somthing that will be fine for my coding

 

[Wuzup101]

Currently 700 British Pounds is a hair over 1300usd. For that price I would suggest an entry level IBM thinkpad T series (or a nice used one if you can find one) or possibly a base level Apple 12" Powerbook or iBook. A lot of the CS majors I know use similar machines. I'm not sure if your comfortable using a Mac, but the 12" powerbook and 12" and 14" iBooks are more than capeable machines and are quite sexy and portable. Make sure you use any and all edu discounts avaliable to you if you buy new (Apple has edu discounts for anyone in college). You can also join their ADC student developers program for $99/year which includes some programming tools and help along with full copies of their operating systems as they are released. The current mac OS is OSX "panther" (10.3) which has a full X11 interface (capeable of running linux programs), OSX 10.4 "tiger" is due within a year and would be included in this when it comes out. With their discounts for developers you can snag a Super Drive (DVD-R) 12" for $1440.... or if you don't need the DVD burner it brings the 12" base PB down to $1280 with the CD-RW/DVD combo drive.