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If it gets in the way or when doing extensive work at your desk, you can always just plug in a mouse and keyboard. Solves that prob...
 
Whatever you get, please get some kind of back up system going. A combo of online/offsite/time machine back ups. I had to tell a grad student that his hard drive was dead and his 2 year worth of work in his research project was gone.
 
Buy whatever suits you, but....

Use LaTex.....don't play with anything else if you're doing a thesis of the scientific variety...

http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html


LaTex will run just fine on any netbook.....

LaTex will save you countless hours of headache in formatting....
 
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