What kind of laptop should I get?

If you go the PC laptop route, do not, under any circumstances, get a laptop with a "Pentium 4" (or even a Celeron) because it will fry your pants and have about 20 minutes of battery life. I exaggerate, but the Pentium-M is a wonderful chip. Don't be enticed by clock speed: a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 laptop isn't going to be much faster than a 1.8GHz Pentium-M, and it's going to be a far, far superior user experience. Seconded. We made this mistake with our first laptop. Laptops are used very differently than desktops. Do not use the same criteria to judge both, or you will be dissapointed.

If I were buying it for you, it would be the Mac. More and more sysadmins have learned. If we buy our relatives macs, we spend much less time repairing those computers than if we buy them Windows machines. (Really, when Mom calls with a computer problem, both flippant and short answers don't work. "RTFM, Mom" is a really bad idea.) So, from a maintenance standpoint -- and I feed Windows machines and BSD boxen at work, and BSD/Apple Boxen at home -- Macs are much easier to keep running smoothly than Wintel. As I often quip. I don't run operating systems. I run applications. The more the operating system stands out, the worse it is. I know guys who are proud of all the things they've done to Windows to make it run better for them. Me? In that time, I've put up the website, written email, and played a few hours of Nethack.

If you can afford it, and if there's nothing you desperately need, or are locked into, in Windows world, go for a Mac. If your school is Windows only, or something, note that a Mac does Windows networking better than Windows, HOWEVER, the tech people probably won't be able to help you do some things - you'll have to figure out what you need to do yourself. Google almost never fails for simple stuff, but you know what I mean.

I have an 12-inch 800 mhz ibook g4 with tiger and 384mb of ram A 2+ year old PC laptop sold at the same pricepoint would be similarly underpowered. (However, if you up that RAM to 768, you'll see a marked improvement). I haven't really noticed problems with hinges on iBooks, at least not worse than similar entry-level PC notebooks. Hinges are a problem on so many laptops. I agree that the rubber feet falling off is a problem that Apple really should have solved years ago. Grrr. iBook keyboards are also a little wonky feeling, and sometimes the KB bows out a little on the edges over time. On the other hand, I carry an iBook as a sidearm exactly because the thing is so durable. Over three years and as many iBooks (lucky me, I get a new laptop every year from the job, and could buy *anything,* which may say something about how much I like iBooks or how dumb I am, but I need absurd durability and reasonable portability, not power, in a laptop) I have dropped them countless times, used them in the rain outdoors, and subjected them to numerous other indignities. I've had no major problems (except a bad CPU on one, that had nothing to do with handling, and which Apple fixed, overnight, one month *out of warranty* -- take that, PC makers). All my old iBooks still run and have retired to honorable reserve duty.

Amberglow hit the nail on the head! Get whatever the school system has. No other features beat compatibility as a factor!

Get whatever the school system has. No other features beat compatibility as a factor! Sure it does. Getting a durable, easy to use, great battery life, great looking laptop is much more important than being able to easily look at a word file. And most compatibility issues are solved easily. Go with the iBook. You'll be happy.

Hm. I realize nothing is as exciting as shopping for a new computer, but unless your school system will pay for a laptop, I'd wait to get one until they do. You have a great desktop you like at home - do you really need a laptop? I'm just thinking of my friend, who's been an elementary school teacher for more than 20 years. She now refuses to buy scads of supplies and other things for her classroom with her personal funds, in part because she thinks it misrepresents how far the school's budget dollars go in addition to draining her salary, which is small enough already. If you're planning on using it to make your students' educational experience richer through interactive presentations, etc., I humbly suggest your employer should pay for it. One caveat: If you have no credit card debt and no school loans, then finance away and buy that computer tomorrow. Otherwise, if I were in your situation, I'd buy a Palm Pilot to carry notes and lesson plans back and forth, and pay yourself first by paying off your debt. I have officially turned into my dad.

This is an http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/22486http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/20892 question. Both the above threads came out heavily in support of iBooks fwiw.

I'm not entirely convinced that a computer is a better way to take notes but <shrug>. Schoolteachers aren't showered with the money that they most definitely should be showered with so I understand the price difference. FWIW, I hate the idea of Dell but my little Latitude is actually a decent machine. SMALL, lightweight, and good looki http://www.notebookspecials.com/image/dell-c400.jpg but most importantly, I haven't had a thing go wrong with it for the past 3 years (and it was a second-hand computer at that). If you just want a lightweight (as in processing power) laptop, going with Apple imvho is just for the eye-candy. WinXP isn't that horrible of a system as a lot of people make it out to be, it's just that you have to spend a little bit more effort to educate yourself.