<p>If you recently bought a laptop, I would certainly not bother. It really isn’t very hard to get it set up with the Dartmouth system if you are even modestly computer literate, and while it’s almost always a waste of money to buy two computers one after the other, the deals offered through the college are typically pretty terrible making it a doubly bad deal (too lazy to fix run-on sentence). Furthermore, in my experience, the people at the IT desk didn’t care if your computer wasn’t bought through the school, and I never got turned away on the rare occasions when I needed to take my computer there.</p>
<p>Oh, and there’s really nothing magical about the Dartmouth system that should make you worry that your computer might not be compatible. The computers you can buy through the College, and the ones it designs its network to be compatible with, are PCs running Windows or Macs. Well, if you buy a computer on your own, there’s approximately a 99.9999% chance it will be either a PC running Windows (maybe not a Dell, which is what the school sells but again, the SYSTEM is the same) or a Mac. And if you’re voluntarily a Linux user, then you are savvy enough to be able to set up your computer properly. So that’s it. There’s really nothing there that isn’t compatible. All you’ll have to do when you get to campus is download Blitzmail and the Internet client and maybe a few other things (Greenprint most likely) off of Dartmouth Computing’s website. It will take all of 10 minutes, tops.</p>