What laptop brands are best?

[TaraJo]

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.

Ok, that should fix things for me.

The problem with the school computer network is, if you want to print anything at the school printers, you can only print something that is actually on one of the school computers. I can't count how many times I've had to email a report to myself just to get on a school computer and print it.