You need to ask yourself and your wife a few questions:
1. Will she have data that must stay behind HIPAA compliance?
2. Does her hospital have a IT dept. that will mandate certain safe guards on laptops for HIPAA compliance?
3. Does the hospital have a discount plan on pc’s and laptops?
4. The locations she will be using the laptop the most, are they fluorescent or incandescent lighting? For flourescent lighting and outdoor lighting, get a “ultrabright” monitor, for incandescent it doesn’t matter so much.
5. She has to decide if she wants a docking station for this laptop, or possibly even two docking stations. This is an expensive addition to buying work laptops.
6. Can you write this off on your taxes? Can you get reimbursed by employer if you can’t write it off on your taxes? If you can answer yes to either of those, price points are less of a problem.
7. Buy the extended warranty plan for a laptop.
8. Wait until the END OF THE APRIL to buy the laptop, and save $100! Intel and AMD are having another round of cpu price reductions this week, but the retailers won’t drop prices for a few weeks.
And... Windows XP. Vista is hell.
my personal experience:
The Siemens are top notch,
and stay away from the Dell M-series business laptops.
You need to talk to her IP department and find out what laptops they recommend. It is even possible that they will not allow personal laptops period.
Do not buy Apple, unless her work network has Macs on it. Vista does not play well with others, so do buy XP if you will be loading any specialized work software. Even format her hard disk and reload XP if you have to.