<p>For UW Madison..... (laptop, of course).....PC or Mac? Does the university have a preference?</p>
<p>as a student here, I can tell you honestly that it doesn’t really matter… If you are going to be going into a ENGR profession, I personally would go PC. some of the programs used are going to work much better on a PC. but some art majors like Mac’s…
it really doesn’t matter one bit.the university supports both very very well… and its up to personal preference 
also, if anyone has any ANY questions about classes or anything about the university… just say so… hope this helps…</p>
<p>Check the UW DoIT- dept of info tech- site for information (UW home page-academics-resources-DoIT-students…). As above, no preference for the university but some majors may. Graphics intensive - MAC, engineering- PC. They give desktop and laptop desirable specs. Your best bet is to get one of the computer deals offered this summer, not this spring (ie July/August).</p>
<p>My son is starting EGR this fall and is buying a new Mac. We are waiting for the new 15’ MacBook Pros which are to be announced very soon. MUCH nicer computers than clunky PC’s. UW-Madison uses Macs everywhere on Campus…in the unions and other buildings, so they are very Mac friendly. Also, with Bootcamp, which comes free with every Apple computer, Macs can run off the Mac OS X operating system OR Windows 7, whichever you prefer. All it takes is a reboot. Best of both worlds!</p>
<p>Be sure to check with the engineering major he is interested in to be sure all of their software will be as good on the MAC. Son was math and comp sci- definitely a PC desktop and also a laptop user. Anti Apple sentiments as well, knowledgable about hardware as well as software. Definitely differing opinions on the two computer types. There are always tradeoffs. “clunky” PCs have many advantages over Apple products in many ways.</p>
<p>UW’s postition is that it doesn’t matter, unless a department has reasons. What does matter in getting the best deals is waiting until the manufacturers come out with their college sales this summer. You have to be patient for most college goods- the sales haven’t started, nor is the most selection available.</p>
<p>Dealing with the same dilemma. My son is looking to be a statistics/math major which involves potentially heavy computing and thus leaning him to a PC. But he so much wants the new MacBook Pro that HawksFan is eluding to. @HawksFan, I thought you can switch between Mac and Windows worlds w/o a reboot. If you partition your hard drive, then you need a reboot but someone told me when you are emulating Windows then you can seamlessly switch between the two worlds.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t rule out used. My daughter got a used, but less than two years old Macbook from a friend of her brother’s. The price she paid was $400, which was in the range one could find for that model on ebay. We had a multiuser pac of the Office Suite for Macs at home, so that was loaded for free. The DoIt store on campus, or via the web has really excellent deals for students for Office for Macs, and many other programs too.</p>
<p>HawksFan (really, HawksFan?) is right on the money about Macs for engineering.
I think the idea that Macs are more for graphics and pcs for engineering is somewhat out of date. For the last 5 or 6 years, Macs have used Duocore Intel chips that can run both Apple Operating Systems and Windows on them. Unless things have changed since I got my own Macbook a few years ago, one has to partition the hard drive into two, and one has to purchase and load windows programs on the second one. You have to shut down and reboot to access the windows side. This is kind of a pain in the butt, and for this reason, I’d might go with PCs for engineering. First, I’d check it out. Maybe the engineering programs are available or Mac OS now. I run an older Windows only version of a CAD/CAM program on my Mac and it works just as well on my humble Macbook as it does on my PC, which I had custom built to optimize for that program.</p>
<p>One thing I think parents should do is remind their students to get in the habit of backing up their computers. It seems most people don’t learn that lesson, unless they have a disaster of some kind. There are multiple ways to do back ups. I’m not informed enough to recommend any certain way.</p>
<p>I stand corrected. Reboot is necessary for Bootcamp. I was thinking of Virtual box which are software that allows one to run Mac and Windows environments in parallel. Slightly slower speed but not much.</p>
<p>So right on backups! Friend of my son’s at UW Madison had a PC crash and lost his research. I know at other UW campuses there are file backup sites definitely a good idea to utilize.</p>