I am in the market for a new laptop and finding that nothing I look at quite has what I want. I thought I would pick the collective brain of us WanderingWinder alts to see if anyone has any advice.
My current machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad T410. I would love to stick with Lenovo and ThinkPad as I've really liked my past two machines which have been ThinkPads. I will not buy a Mac. Don't even suggest it.
My "needs": I'm a college student who just declared a double major in chemistry and computer science.
I'd like a machine with the performance to run a browser with a bunch of tabs, some software like Origin, a terminal emulator, excel, an IDE (I like geany), mathematica, etc. comfortably, something my computer currently struggles with (Origin especially just slows everything down a ton. I think that problem might lie with the software, not my computer). Also being able to execute some computationally intensive scripts would be nice, though anything too big I can run remotely on a cluster. I don't do much gaming, though it would be nice if games would run and be playable.
I'm thinking about trying to dual-boot with W8 and Ubuntu. So in addition to the >300GB of stuff I probably want to store (250GB filled up on my current machine) it would be nice to have the space to partition the hard drive.
I also have a set up with an external monitor and usb hub attached to an external keyboard and mouse. Currently that takes a VGA port and 1 usb port on my laptop. The wifi at my school is terrible (even with my probably-not-allowed wireless access point in my apartment), so being able to plug into ethernet at my desk is desirable.
To further complicate things, I would like to, if possible, transition to paperless notes and therefore it would be awesome to have a convertible laptop/tablet with a stylus. The more I look into this, the more it looks like the performance sacrifices might not be worth it, but the idea of having all of my notes electronically is very appealing.
Any advice or suggestions are most appreciated.
