Computer advice?

[colorisnt]

Mine won't be helpful, but I am going to tell you not to buy a dell. Especially since your computer is your lifeline, I wouldn't do it!

During my senior year of college when I was faced with conferences, writing a thesis, and papers, my computer died before school even started. It was about 9 months old. The consultant contracted by Dell further broke my computer while replacing the HD. I then asked for another consultant but he came back and verbally abused me as well as screamed obscenities at the Dell CSR helping him when he couldn't get the computer to work.

This left me with a computer that did not work for 4 weeks before Dell agreed to send a replacement. The replacement was delayed another 3 weeks. By this time I had bought another (acer netbook) computer. The computer I eventually received was NOT a good replacement. it was about 10X's too big and did not have any of the components my previous $3000.00 PC had had. It was about 1/2 the PC. I was told to keep the replacement and there was nothing they could do.

Finally, the Dell was failing after a month of ownership. An email sent to Michael Dell himself got me another computer which is now only about 15 months old. It is also having issues and I have had to replace the OS. In this time, I spent probably 150 hours on the phone with customer support.

I will never buy another Dell and will also never buy a protection program on ANY PC I buy. If I bought another computer, it would be a cheaper one that I could upgrade.

That said, I run everything (including STATA) on my netbook currently. It is probably 4 years old now (it was a Tiger direct refurb). I can't say enough good things about it. I do a lot of presentations on it and it will be coming to Ottawa with me when I present in the fall. I would not get JUST a netbook, but I think a lot of the BS Dell tells you about performance is "bunk". the XPS system I originally purchased was doomed to fail from the beginning and was a gaming computer that my boyfriend at the time (a computer scientist and electrical engineer) could NOT game on.

If you are a grad student, something RELIABLE is what you need. Do not be like me and go a whole semester without a computer. The one I have now is like a brick. I just hook an external monitor up to the netbook and run off of that. I can't wait until I can replace this dang thing because it sucks so bad! Get the biggest battery you can get - period. That is worth more than just about anything. Get something SMALL and LIGHT. You will be carrying it all over the place. Get a monitor for doing STATA or whatever you use. Save yourself some money and hassle, though.

Edited to reply to Bethany:

Yes, they run powerpoint. However, they do not seamlessly do so and require a very expensive adapter to do so. Several people in my department tried it this year and after much frustration and a lot of money spent, several times we could just not get it to work and had to just transfer the stuff to a PC.