You're welcome, iamesperambient.
This is new concern to be aware of, but, thankfully, this is not occurring on all laptops yet.
I am having a devil of a time this year finding a decent laptop on which to run Linux. Windows 7 computers tend to be both rare and costly, and I'm finding a lot more of these newer computers have a touch-enabled screens for Window 8.1 -- something I have no need or interest in.
Also, I'm finding many laptop computers with 4 GBs of memory, and, from what I have read online, 6 GBs help make things considerably better for the internal hard drive of a computer. (I don't know exactly why this is so, but I have read that it is. Something about the added memory taking strain off of the hard drive, I believe.)
iamesperambient, good luck finding a desktop computer that will suit your academic needs. If we both make good purchases, I would think we ought to be in good shape with our converted to Linux OS computers for quite a while.
