<p>i'm definately going to bring a laptop or desktop with me but is a printer neccessary?</p>
<p>Bring a printer (or share one with your roommate). You can print anywhere on campus but you'll be charged per page. And you don't need a laptop, most people never feel the need to move it from their rooms.</p>
<p>yeah, a printer is fairly necessary.</p>
<p>buy an inexpensive black and white laser. if you ever need to print in color (which is rare, obviously), either use a lab/library's printer or a friend's who made the mistake of buying an inkjet.</p>
<p>lasers cost the same as injets, but are incredibly fast. Mine cost $120 shipped overnight, including the ink cartridge, and it has a warmup time of 3 or so seconds before the first job, followed by 1 page every 3 or 4 seconds. I'm estimated to get around 2000 pages of text out of one cartridge as well. The cartridges are more expensive for a laser (60-80 for a budget laser), but the higher cost of the laser cartridges is completely offset by the efficiency over an inkjet. The money you'll save over 4 years of college on ink by using the higher volume laser cartridges makes the printer effectively free.</p>
<p>This is what I have: <a href="http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=hp+1012&btnG=Search%5B/url%5D">http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=hp+1012&btnG=Search</a>
and I still haven't needed to replace the cartridge after the entirity of freshman year.</p>