Most important: minimum 30 day return policy, no restocking fee if poss. You need to take the laptop to coffee shops, office, home, train, see what's annoying,

Most important: minimum 30 day return policy, no restocking fee if poss. You need to take the laptop to coffee shops, office, home, train, see what's annoying, like glossy screens may make you crazy. So i recommend Amazon, Costco, Target.com for returns policy things that can render a laptop unusable: - poor display, keyboard, or wireless card; excess fan noise or heat. nice to have: fast Core 2 Duo, minimum 2G RAM, if you're doing lots of compiles, spidering (DOM tree extraction), database indexing, anyting that pegs CPU's for more than a couple minutes. like everybody else, my first choices would be macbook or Macbook pro/ Vmware fusion/ Windows XP and ubuntu, or thinkpad with XP/grub/ubuntu (i don't think you can buy them with XP pre-loaded anymore). Toshiba, Dell, HP still sell XP pre-loaded (the "downgrade option") Macbook is only model < $1800 that has DVI out, which makes a big difference Toshiba satellites aren't bad, mine's been reliable for 3 years. Read the amazon reviews. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268438 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197182