Also, consider a solid state drive. They're new enough that the data set isn't large, but the technology promises to be much more robust than a mechanical drive. Price per gigabyte keeps going down too...

u gonna do your exams the same way?

Computers I have used in law school and my thoughts on them:

Dell XPS M1710 – 17 inch monster gaming computer. Loved the big screen, the huge keybord, the assume battery life. Hated the weight, killed my back with all my books in a backpack. HUGE power transformer that would dim the lights in the classroom when I pluged it in. Best feature: LED lights I could set to red and blinking to screw with the epelictics in the classroom.

Dell Insperion – 15 inch, workhourse, nothing fancy. Good combination between size and screen/keyboard. Decent no frills computer that my school had all of us buy. Cons is it looked just like everyone elses and if you put it down you could not tell whose was whose without turning it on.

Dell Studio XPS 13 – loved the weight, keyboard was fine, screen size was fine, battery life fine with nine cell, SSD is fast as hell, processor takes everything you through at it. Perfect size/weight for me. Con is I found I needed and external monitor (27 inch), keyboard and mouse at home as writing all the time on that tiny keyboard was a pian. So with a docking station this is my primary lawptop and I love it to death. One con: it gets HOT. Use a chill pad to cool it down.

Dell Adamo – WTF was I thinking? Cool looking as all hell. Very slim and light. Same size keyboard as the XPS 13, great screen. Overpriced and underpowered though. Built in video makes screen resulation on the 27 inch moniter look like crap. Pretty, but useless. Relgiated to my secondary take to coffe shops and stuff computer and leave the XPS docked 100% time now. Don’t buy this thing unless you got money to burn.

13 inch MacBook Pro – love it, looks cool, boots up fast, never crashed. Cons first Mac and I am an Miscrosft junkie. Pretty much just use it for playing around with.

are you a 9L? why so many?