We have been buying a laptop. There was a time when eager young students embarking on their university career would be happy with a pencil or two, a couple of biros in different colours, and the cheapest A4 pad they could find. Rulers and hole-punches were an optional extra, while a pocket calculator was the preserve of sons and daughters of the aristocracy. Now they want a laptop. And probably feel aggrieved that they have had to wait this long to get one, when all their friends got their first laptop when they started primary school.
But buying computers is a chore. There are so many to choose from. And they all look pretty much the same, and they all have pretty much the same specification, and they all do pretty much the same thing; and, most importantly, they are all light-years ahead in computing power of what you need for sending an e-mail or reading a webpage or running nanosecond molecular dynamics simulations on solvated proteins of a few tens of thousands of atoms. And yet - and yet - we worry over the exact combination of processors and RAM and disk space and graphics cards, yearning for the one specification that is not commercially available, or, worse still, was available everywhere for the last 6 months but has vanished off the shelves on the day you decide to buy one.
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