<p>I am in my last quarter of high school and plan to major in Chemical or BioEngineering. I have a full ride to my local community college which is a good one and plan to transfer to The University of Maryland College Park to continue to study after one year at the community college. So a family member of mine said that she would get me whatever laptop i chose as a graduation present, so it would cost me nothing. Ofcourse with that in mind the first place I looked was towards the highest end MacBook Pro. However, after looking into it it seems that atleast a couple years ago you couldn't run some necessary engineering programs on a Mac. However, I found more recent posts saying that you could, but also more that you can not have a Mac as an engineer student. So, I was wondering that if price was not a factor, what laptop is the "best", most recommended, and most likely to get me through 4-6 years of either chemical engineering or bioengineering. I would like a current engineering student at UMD's take on this. I haven't looked further into any other laptops so please give me your best recommendations and please be specific. Thanks!!</p>
<p>I’m not a current engineering student, but macs can run both mac os and windows 7 (in emulation). I don’t know about windows 8. My mac runs XP extremely well and has for many years.</p>
<p>Macs can dual-boot Windows, you shouldn’t have any issue running what you need to run.</p>