DH,
You have a lot of good advice by now. I have a bit of a long view - my undergraduate thesis was written with a manual typewriter, and my PhD thesis was written using IBM Selectrics, except I had 4 of the department secretaries volunteer to do the actual typing. Wonderful people.
There is a presumption that the thesis will be prepared using MS Word or equivalent. I teach graduate courses in the physical sciences, which means lots of equations. Whenever I take a poll as to what program is used to prepare manuscscripts, it is 100% Latex. YMMV.
To first order, the operating system is irrelevant, but I guess it depends on what your field of research is.
A couple of people have stressed the need for backups, and I heartily endorse those comments. The worst thesis disasters I have seen all involved loss of data due to no backups. One of them involved line printer output that had been accidentally carted off to the city dump - the guy actually traveled to the dump to try and recover it (apparently without success). These days almost every I know uses Macs, and they rely on time-machine to provide backups. I work a little differently and spread out my work on lots of machines at different locations, so I rely on occassional backups to offline storage combined with mass replication to all those machines (mainly accomplished using code repositories).
A good keyboard and a good trackpad matter, and they are only loosely coupled to the cost of the machine. My all-time favorite keyboard was on a machine that cost $3000. My current favorite is on a machine that cost $350. My $120 machine keyboard is pretty nice too, but the trackpad stinks. Others may chime in here.
Last edited by sk999; 26th Aug 2017 at 01:38.
Reason: formatting