Desktop V Laptop.

[Yorkie]

The main issue is whther you want portabilty or not.

Ordinarily, when at home I use a desktop and a 17" flat screen monitor. I also have a 15" Macbook Pro laptop and a slimline 'Macbook Air' which is very light and portable. Both of the latter were rescued from my elder son who was ditching them - they literally fell into my lap! One needed a new hard drive, (fitted myself at a cost of £28.00), the other needed close on £300 of repairs, but Apple repaired in FOC as it was a known design flaw.

We're often away from home, and I take the Macbook Air. I also take it to town if my wife goes shopping - so many coffee shops have free wi-fi that I just plonk myself in a corner with a coffeee and furtle about on internet. Same if we're away for longer - free wi-fi on the train, at motorway services, at B&Bs. Most Hotels in the UK and the rest of Europe offer free wi-fi and any hotels that charge for wi-fi such as Holiday Inns, I cross off my list. Just booked hotels in Leeds, Paris and the Yorkshire Dales, and B&B in Northumbria - all offer free wi-fi or I wouldn't have booked them. I also take a laptop when we stay with our two married sons who live away, and I sometimes use my laptop at home in the evening if I'm sat in the lounge after tea and my desktop is switched off.

Having said all this, no way would I consider a laptop as an alternative to a desktop - only ever in addition to.

Unless I was pushed for space, or need the portabilty of a laptop, personally, I'd only ever consider a desktop if I couldn't have one of each. You get a larger monitor, larger kepyboard, proper mouse - not an annoying mousepad, and as Paula has said, a desktop is upgradable - many, if not most laptops, aren't. That said, the spec of many desktop computers far exceeds what most of us want to do, such as gaming, but I guess it's better to have a higher spec computer that exceeds our needs and limps along at a pedestrian pace, than a lower spec one that struggles at times.

Really, if you only want to have one computer and consider that portabilty around the home and away from home is an essential requirement, then clearly it would have to be a laptop. If on the other hand, portability isn't a must-have, I don't think a laptop confers any advantages over a desktop, but has several disadvantages as I've tried to outline. When we were stuck with stonking great big CRT monitors I might have aceeded that a laptop isn't so 'in your face' but that isn't so with modern flat-screen monitors.

As to operating systems, I've no interest in the merits of the various offerings and when people start enthusing about Linux or whatever, my eyes glaze over. I use Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit, and it's never skipped a beat. Some older programs aren't very happy with it, but you can run them in 'compatibility mode'. I'm happy with IE9, but on the laptops use Safari. For e-mail I use Mozzila Thunderbird rather than Outlook.

Not everyone will agree with my stance - I don't mind dissenting views.