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This has been a really interesting thread to read.
True it's a few years since I graduated from Engineering School - 10 to be exact. Most of you have already hit on the key points.

I actually had a laptop when I started - all those years ago. It was a Kaypro!

Things to keep in mind:
In the actual engineering classes the laptop was useless. It's kind of hard to do all the symbols and graphs you need to do at the speed you have to record it.
The Seiko smartpad may actually be useful for this.

What stuff do you actually need to carry with you. I use a Dell Latitude at work. It's great for carrying to meetings but a pain for business trips. The 3.5" & the CD drive all all external but man is it thin & easy to carry the laptop.

I'm sure you've already checked but a lot of times schools will have really good deals for students.

One final thing to think about is whether or not you're going to co-op during school. If so, where are you thinking of working and what do they use? If you're going automotive - Windows based. If you're going some other route than explore those.

Oh! And the biggest help of all CRIBS! (Old test, home work) many libraries have them and most of the Greek houses. They help a lot.

Good luck!

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"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." Benjamin Franklin

I've been looking around and found a few good sites for OSX. http://www.macosxhints.com and http://www.macosxapps.com I also found this nice guide for Samba @ http://www.opensource.apple.com/pro...tml/osxsmb.html from macosxhints.com. It seems like a perfect solution if you can get the drives to automount (put the passwords and such on The Keychain?) Anyone know if that's possible?

Thanks!

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-Vincent

This is what the basic share favourites will look like. Since then I have added the username as well in the favourites link, but I manually enter the password each time. However, you don't have do it that way I believe.

By the way, here I am running Virtual PC with Windoze 2000. I'm posting to a PC forum in Windows and a Mac forum in OS X, simultaneously. And, you'll note the (see-thru) Unix terminal open too.

As I've said before though, VPC is very slow with 384 MB in OS X. You really need more memory for this, esp. in OS X, and a G4 Titanium would be preferred.

Eug

Thanks for the screenshots and info. The Mac OS is very, very elegant. The terminal looks semi-formidable as I know but a few DOS commands. I bet I could get used to it (I know that's not a necessity, but being a geek at heart I'd have to learn .) I remember seeing a neat app that displayed an overlay (you still had the normal terminal window, too) the terminal window on the desktop. I'm glad you can bookmark servers. If you did answer this but I'm too silly to notice I apologize but is there a way to make OSX automatically mount those shares if you save the passwords?

Thanks!
Vin

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-Vincent

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Another problem. The MSCA the college I'll attend doesn't have as much mac selection really.

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For windows they have Visual Studio which I would need for programing I assume?

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This one Compaq I found is pretty nice too. 6.5 pounds isn't too bad at $1500 w/ 1 1GHZ PIII-M 384MBRAM 30GB HD DVD/CDRW/14"LCD.

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We're all naked if you turn us inside out.
-David Byrne