<p>Does financial aid look enough into your savings for it to make a difference whether you buy a laptop before or after you fill out forms?</p>
<p>What do you guys have for computers?</p>
<p>I would suggest waiting right before you go off to college to buy one; August through September is when Apple has their “Buy a Mac, get a free iPod” deal for students. </p>
<p>Also, you may get discounts at other places if you use a student id or something that shows you’re a college student.</p>
<p>^
mac ftw</p>
<p>As bigmouth said, wait until the summer for the Apple deals if you want to buy an Apple laptop. If you wait during the summer, you are guaranteeing yourself the newest specs so it will last you longer. Also, if you don’t want to pay for a new one, Apple has some really good refurbished Macs, so you could think about buying one of those as well. </p>
<p>I currently have a HP Pavilion dv2550se that I bought two years ago when I went to boarding school. I am probably going to switch over to Apple and put Windows 7 using Parallels or Boot Camp.</p>
<p>Your paying so much extra for a free ipod. Buy a pc and buy yourself a touch with the extra money you save.</p>
<p>and watch it crash in a year.</p>
<p>“and watch it crash in a year.”</p>
<p>facepalm.</p>
<p>^And then you reboot and it’s all cool again.</p>
<p>Yay for Bill Gates</p>
<p>^Yup exactly, haha. PCs suck. (annndddd a Mac vs. PC thread is born. Just kidding, let’s not get into it, my love for Apple will drive me crazy)</p>
<p>No matter what kind of computer you buy, you can get really huge software discounts at the Academic Super store (google it!)</p>
<p>I’ve had my PC for a little over two years now and it hasn’t had a single problem yet. Just don’t download porn and you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>In general, the summer is the best time for whatever computer you want. It’s just late summer that’s best if you want a Mac.</p>
<p>I’ll probably buy mine July and August.</p>
<p>PS: I’ve used Windows all my life and never had problems. Maybe it’s because I know how to take care of a computer. I love when Mac users claim that people who use Windows are noobs with computers. Those people obviously are the type of people who get a virus and throw their PC away because it’s apparently “useless”. Format it!</p>
<p>I’d personally never get a Mac, simply because it’s much harder to access the internal framework (in addition to the exorbitant price). I’ve been dual booting windows xp and linux fedora on my desktop since 2006, and it has yet to fail me.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Dell hardware is kind of falling apart =/, hence why I just bought a new HP laptop instead of replacing the parts. I’m dual booting Windows 7 x64 and Linux Gentoo on it, and I’ve got a Backtrack disk somewhere as well.</p>
<p>Good times to buy are during the Black Friday sales, the Christmas sales, and the back-to-school sales. Make sure you check the store price against the online price, as stores will often initially overprice and then “slash” sales down to their normal price range to make it seem like you’re getting a deal.</p>
<p>(Only hipsters get macs ;))</p>
<p>My laptop would take a **** on a mac</p>
<p>Lol, computer viruses. Must suck to have to deal with those. </p>
<p>Btw I love that Windows 7 commercial where the women has like five things running and is amazed that she doesn’t need to worry about crashing. And the other PC commercial when it starts in a couple seconds and everyone is amazed. Little bit late on those “innovations,” Microsoft.</p>
<p>I do understand the advantages of PCs that Aero described, they just don’t apply to me. I will freely admit that Macs are not quite as “computer people” computers–though there are tons of exceptions to this.</p>
<p>It’s not like you had to worry much about crashes with XP or (for the limited time that I had it) Vista. Tbh, there were frequent crashes with specific games I played, but it’s not like those games even worked on Macs. I have found spinning beach balls of death to be a problem though when using Macs, even during non-intensive use.</p>
<p>Get a PC. For the price of the worst Mac, you can get a PC with a 500GB Hard Drive, NVidia 240M, P8700 Processor rated at 2.53 GHz. </p>
<p>That’s a machine that can run virtually every game on the market today… while my friend’s Mac struggles to run Call of Duty 2.</p>
<p>Well… if you really are so incompetent a person as to crash a computer within a year, then you should get a Mac… <em>ZOMG! Free iPOD e-mail!!! *click</em></p>
<p>Might I add that the free iPod is worth $200. Quite a bargain.</p>
<p>Also, if you’re really a hard-core gamer, you can always run Windows on a Mac. In fact, I believe PC magazine voted the iMac to be the best machine to run Windows with a year or two ago…</p>
<p>you guys do know that the day after the date for that free ipod deal thing expires apple release the new ipod touch right?? Apple does it every year.
It’s more of a strategy to get rid of their ipod stock before releasing a new one than trying to make a sweet deal. You guys are just being manipulated into thinking “What a nice deal!”</p>