[sciberjack]

well I gave my teenager a challenge 2 years ago when she got her scholarship and acceptance letter to Montana State: Find a windoze machine that has the specs of a mac and compare the prices. She found three: an XPS, an Alienware machine, and one Inever heard of before. The specs (firewire, dvd+/- drive, 2GB Ram or better, 120 GB Drive or better) The Mac was actually cheaper, and they were unable to natively run a fully supported OS X Version (Sorry hackintoshers OSX86 was only an unsupported Beta released/leaked by Apple to see if they should go with Intel or AMD).
Second if you not familiar as of yet with troubleshooting OS X or Linux you probably don't want to have to take a crash course in doing so with a midterm deadline over your head so get one that is supported. If you buy a Mac Apple supports it, if you install Windows on your Mac Microsoft supports it if it is run natively via bootcamp. If you hackintosh or linux your box better be hacker smart.

Mac is starting to grab big businesses attention, since so many of their employees are starting to get iphones, ipods and mac books for personal usage. Thing is steve Jobs decided a long time ago his target market was the home user. When the Board of Directors tried to force him to go business he resigned and Apple almost went under till he came back. So business apps are second class citizens for him but he is starting to allow more development towards them. Iphones new office support is a prime example.
N E ways my daughter gave sucked up her pride gave in and let me by her a MB Pro. She threatened to break my arm when I offered to replace it with the XPS she so desperatly wanted a year ago, and called me an idiot if I thought I could replace her Mac with a POS.