The Colgate Bookstore sells Dells and Macs preconfigured to meet the requirements of the University. Essentially you need Win XP Pro and enough CPU and HD, plus wifi. The good part is that if you buy it from them they supposedly will repair it and even offer you loaners if there is a problem and they will configure them.
However, even with the Bookstore discount, they are more expensive (at least the Dells are) than you can get them yourself. What I did last year was to check out the configuration of what the bookstore was selling and then went to
www.techbargains.com and put in for an e-mail notification for when Dell was offering coupons and specials for the same laptop as the bookstore was selling. Within about a few weeks Dell had a sale on the same notebook. So I configured it on the Dell site the same as the bookstore's and checked out the price. It turned out that I could get a better configured Dell laptop and also the 3 year onsite warranty for less than the bookstore was selling theirs.
And that Dell onsite warranty is solid. They will send someone to whereever you are, with the parts and repair it the very next day, essentially for anything with no questions asked. In fact, when my daughter was home for break, our dog attacked it. The next day Dell replaced the screen, motherboard and keyboard.
It's pretty easy to configure your laptop to log on to the Colgate network. They post instructions and if you really can't do it, there are tech geeks who will go to your dorm room and do it or help you out.
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