Those with laptops/notebooks, please read & reply.

[Capri306]

Hey everyone, hope your holiday season is going great so far! Okay, here's the dilemma: I can't decide which laptop to ask for for Christmas. I've narrowed my selection down to TWO possibilities, with price and bang-for-buck being the main things I was concerned with; both are Toshiba Satellites. They are, 1) #1805-S274 and 2) #5005-S504. Both run at 1.1 GHz with P-III processors, both have DVD-ROM/CD-RW and 15" screens, and both have 2 PCMCIA slots.

The MAIN difference I see (besides #2 having 512MB RAM vs. 256MB in #1) is the ports on them are different. I can either have 3 USBs and 1 FireWire port, OR I can have 2 USBs, 1 parallel port, and one serial port. HD size is also larger on the one with FireWire.

This will be my first laptop, so I need some input here on which you would prefer if you were in my shoes: I'm a 21-year-old college student that's going to be going to a university for a degree in electrical engineering, whom also needs to have a system that can do some minor shtuff with media such as still pictures and possibly video in the near future. My instincts tell me it's better to go with the second unit, simply because I don't see myself using parallel or serial ports that often, because virtually everything is USB now...plus that 512MB just has to scream!!!! Let me know what you think please!!!!