Usb pen drive or lappy?
 

Right, here goes,
Next year I'm gonna be living in town rather than on campus so I won't have access to the uni network next year (they are going to have a wireless network covering Aber, but it's not up yet IIRC). We are not going to have internet or b/b access in our house next year, and since I have a desktop PC at the moment I need some way of transferring files and stuff from the un inetwork to my PC. I'm not sure whether to get a cheap lappy and use that (can plug it in to the network in certain places on campus) to transfer files between uni and PC or to get one of these USB pen drives for th esame thing.
One of the main things is cost, but i've also been thinking of the following:
1. You can get USB pen drives that double as MP3 players, and i'm thinking of investing in one anyway
2. A lappy can be taken on the train so I could use it to do work/watch DVD's when travelling home at weekends.

What sort of costs would I be looking at for each option? Any other suggestions/advice welcome.

Bex

Just a point about getting an mp3 player pen drive. Make sure that you don't need to install a driver for the device.

I bought a creative mp3 player hopoing to use it to transfer files from school to home, only to find out that you need to install a driver. I don't have the access rights to do this at school, nor would the technicians do it for me.

So I am now going to get an additional usb drive which is auto recognised on XP.

ebay for a cheap laptop or consider buying a driverless usb drive or SD card + reader

Yeah - Ebay's ya man for cheapness on this one. How about a PDA (the Ipaq has wireless networking built in to some of the models - or you can buy an SD card to give it to some of the others), then you've got a MP3 player in that as well :D

I wanted to go down the USB route for my Uni with an LS120 drive I found very cheap, but both the USB ports were deactived and they wouldn't make an exception for me. Ended up with a zip drive in the end to do the job, as the parallel port was available (whether they liked it or not), this was the cheapest option for a 250MB transfer as the drives aren't dear and you'll only need 3/4 zips to get 1GB of info over each time you go.