Notebook Recommendations for College

[Fordlife]

Getting ready to transfer to a California UC (UC Santa Barbara UC Davis) and think buying a laptop before i go is a good idea.

Dell? Gateway? Toshiba? These seem to be the top notebooks. What about Apple Powerbooks? Will those be tough after using a Sony PC for 10 years?

Should I go wireless? I know I want one with 802.11b and fromt what I have read, I should get 802.11g also. Supposedly "a" is not going to make it?

Whats the deal with Dells Truemobile technology? Is that a better idea or should I just get a centrino and buy a 802.11g adapter later?
I feel that a laptop is the way to go for college because if my dorm is not study-able I can pick up and go. I believe all the UC's are hotspots too, I will find out.

Also, say i get a notebook with Wi-fi. How does connection to the internet work? I would need an ISP? My friend says she sees a bunch of students in class "IMing" eachother. This is obviously done over the internet but via what provider? Do the campuses have free wireless ISP? I know all the dorms are wired for connection to enternet ports.

Thanks
Ryan

[Phoenix]

All the brands you mention are fine. I have a Dell at work and a Compaq at home both with add-on wireless cards. Personally, I'd stay away from anything with built-in wireless. You're pretty much stuck with what's inside. In the case of the Centrino, you get three year old technology that Intel will charge you a premium for. A lot of the others use inferior chipsets with poor range, etc. Your best bet is to buy a computer without wireless and add on a wireless-G adaptor (Netgear and D-Link are the best for that right now).

As for how to connect on campus, you need to check with the school's computing department. Many universities are installing wireless-B access points throught their campuses that you can connect to if you have a student computer account.

Off campus connections to the internet are hit or miss. It's not like a cell phone where you have connection almost everywhere. You have to go to a hot spot where you have an account with their ISP (For example, T-Mobile has hot spots in some Starbucks and even Kinko's).

[bobmanw]

yeah, check with your school,
i have a toshiba satellite pro 6000, it has built in wireless 802.11b
but at the university where i go, even though use the same standard, i can't access it because they use cisco hardware with LEAP authentication, so you have to buy a cisco/ 350 series card or a card that supports LEAP.

[jatkins679]

Originally posted by Phoenix
Personally, I'd stay away from anything with built-in wireless. You're pretty much stuck with what's inside. In the case of the Centrino, you get three year old technology that Intel will charge you a premium for.

As for how to connect on campus, you need to check with the school's computing department. Many universities are installing wireless-B access points throught their campuses that you can connect to if you have a student computer account.

Agreed: if I were paying for it myself, I would definitely stay away from built-in wireless. You're paying a premium for that built-in feature and in my book, it's just another piece of equipment that could go wrong but you cannot fix/replace yourself (like a lot of laptop components).

Plus, if you have a PCMCIA wireless card, you can always buy a card and if it doesn't seem to work for you/gives you too many problems, you can always return it and try another brand (contrary to what the WiFi branding says, not all products play well with each other, sometimes it takes some experimenting).

B is going to be the technology most campuses are going to be using for quite awhile, IMHO. Most schools are just getting into the whole WLAN thing, they and their IT people are going to want to keep it simple and even as they move up in technology (a or g or whatever), demand will simply dictate that they remain backward-compatible with b. Plus the UC campuses, they are in such horrible straits right now and for the foreseeable future when it comes to budgets, they aren't going to have the luxury of messing around with new equipment for general consumption just to go with what's the newest stuff.