I’ve had bad experiences with Dell as well, never owned one personally and never will. A company I worked for used Dells, every morning I would have to put and remove the laptop from the dock up to 20 times to get it to power up. How hard is it the laptop and a docking station? I had the support group look at it, Dell looked at it and they couldn’t figure it out. The following week someone else in my department got a new machine, hers did the same thing; others in the company were having the same issue. Dell was stumped. They feel cheap because they are cheap.

CJ,

Why not ask you mom for a laptop and a desktop? Take the laptop to school and have the desktop at home/dorm. You could use the desktop to backup the important files from the laptop. You can run VitualPC to get windows on a Mac, just don't expect stellar performance.