I need a new laptop

A mac would be my first choice, but if you're on a smaller budget and looking to go windows or linux, I'd go for a lenovo/IBM, or a toshiba.

I would avoid toshibas.My mother's satellite from 2002 began to fall apart right after she got it. The worst part about toshibas is they like to use their own brand of hard drives, which are the worse I have ever used. I had a 20gb that died on me some time ago. The 30gb on the laptop died in 2005, about 3 years, which is not long for a hard drive. The trackpad buttons also broke down, forcing her to use an external mouse, and the case started to chip in a bunch of places, the worst being the heatsink grille in the back, exposing it to body parts.

if you have to stick with PC laptops, get a thinkpad, as I have heard very good things about them. But I would also suggest watching the apple store refurb sections, as you can get some awesome deals in there,

-digital

I've been down this road before. My credit has never been terribly great. Anyways, back in October of 2001, I decided to get myself an iBook. I did the Apple Instant loan (back then it was through MBNA - now Bank of America), and ended up with an interest rate of 26.99%. If that wasn't bad enough, I wasn't bright enough to realize that you should pay ahead and not just make the minimum payments - within a year - I started getting over the limit fees as interest managed to push my balance up and my payments weren't keeping up. I ended up with some money coming in from a lawsuit I was involved in and paid it off with a negotiated settlement to pay off the loan.

Needless to say, I learned a very valuable lesson through the whole experience - if I can't pay for it with the money on me or conjure the money in a short period of time (2-3 months), I don't need it. (there are some exclusions to the rule in my case - a car for instance)

For a means of buying the laptop - if you can't get student loans to cover it, you'll probably be better off looking at what your credit card options. With that, don't let your credit card balance exceed 50% of what the maximum is and avoid Capitol One (they don't report what you owe vs your maximum, just what you owe - so you look like a worse risk when applying for credit elsewhere).

I'm in the process of rebuilding my credit - it's proving to be a less than fun adventure, but by 2010, things will be far better than they presently are.

If you're going to be working with Cisco stuff, I'd get a laptop with a built-in serial port. All you'll be doing really is Telnet, so the crappiest little laptop you can find will be plenty. If you want something newer that you can goof around with, a used Dell off of eBay would be perfect for you. I wouldn't buy a Mac unless you want to have all of your instructors give you crap about it (most network guys have no respect for Apple).

Yeah good point about the serial port. My ThinkPad does not have a serial port on it, only on the port replicator. So I use a USB-Serial adapter to connect to the Cisco stuff at work. It works but I would much rather have a built in serial port.