> but I don't think a Mac is would work for me.

Just curious - why not?

Remember, if all else fails, you can run Windows on your Mac. Not that you'd want to. :)

- J

Suprisingly I'm not here to tag team. Though I still think a Mac would be great for you now that they can run Windows XP just like a PC... I am actually here to defend Dell LOL. Though the computer itself was pretty faulty, and the initial customer service did suck, they came through for me and shipped me a new reimaged hard drive and credited my credit card to have it installed locally so that I wouldn't have to ship my computer in to them. I pocketed the money and installed it myself and it's worked well ever since. Unfortunately I look at it everyday all shiny and new and all I can think is... I wish it were a Mac... which is probably the way you think you'd feel about a Mac. I'll bring our mac mini over one of these days and show you what it's capable of! = )

I actually agree with the two J's on this.

I would have bought a Mac myself - mostly for asthetics but it doesn't really jive with my continuing education goals. So I had to be a bit more practical.

I think a mac would be ideal for you for a lot of reasons. While I cannot attest to their superior stability since I haven't used one consistently for a long time - you seem to need something more reliable. Also - mac is by far the power house in all things creative and artistic - which seems perfect for you and a lot of your hobbies.

Dell's are nice. I never had a single problem with the first one until it died after 5 years. Not bad for a laptop. And I haven't had any problems with the current one either (knock on wood).

Regardless - if you do decide to buy a new one talk to me and I'll help you see if there is a student discount available for CBC. There is for just about every school. I am not sure if mine with Dell is still good since I graduated. But when I ordered mine they only needed my school email - which I still have.

Good luck!

Hmmm, my main concern comes with a Mac being compatible with .avi formats and bittorent like clients. That's probably one of the only reasons I haven't bought one yet. That, and photoshop is like a grand for the Mac.

You can get software way cheap if you get a school discount. I think most require either a student email or a fax of your admission letter or student ID. Or something along those lines.

I've seen several of Adobe's $1000+ programs for a couple hundred with a student discount.

There isn't anything to be concerned about there. It's both a Windows PC and a Mac OS computer. It does both, on the same computer. Anything you can do with a PC you can also do it on a Mac. Well, you do have to buy a copy of Windows, but that's quite a bit less than you've probably spent with just this latest trip to the Geek Squad. All you do is hold down the "Alt" key on the keyboard and you can choose to run Windows XP instead of Mac OS. It's actually very slick. It runs it on a separate partition of the hard drive so the two OS' are always completely separate entities. Yet you can use the same keyboards, mice, monitors... the whole shebang. And Mac Mini's like the one I use ocassionaly start at $599. You might still want to consider one.