What laptop brands are best?

[Red Celt]

The main software concerns are as follows:

Word processing and school computers. As of now, when I need to print something at school (and that happens a lot) the computer system only seems to read Microsoft Word documents. If Mac uses a different word processor, that could be a very big problem for me.

This confuses me slightly. The computer system only reads MS Word documents? You need to copy the files to a different computer for printing, rather than printing them directly from your laptop? As I said, I have MS Office on my MacBook, so that isn't an issue. Also, other Office suites (including a free one called OpenOffice) saves files in .DOC or .DOCX format. So, again, not a problem.

As for web browsers, the ones you're familiar with also have Mac installations. I use Chrome and Firefox on my MacBook. The Apple one (Safari) is rarely used.

And the MacBook has an inbuilt webcam that works very well.