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vlad

1) Join Apple's Student Dev Program for $99.

2) Buy a Macbook Pro 15 inch glossy screen Penryn for $1599 from the Dev Store, with an upgrade to the 250GB drive.

3) Buy VMWare Fusion for $39 from Studica.com.

4) Buy 4GB of memory for $99 from Crucial.com.

5) Install OS X, Windows, and Linux into VMWare Fusion and break the operating systems as much as you want.

Total cost for a mobile machine you can take with you so you can break it as often as you want: about 2,000 after taxes. I'll have all the steps up (including other things to install) at some point for everybody to see.

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Vlad's recipe is a good one. It might be more than you want to pay, but it is an excellent investment in learning about operating systems. Nowadays computing is more heterogeneous than ever with virtualization becoming more and more important. If you follow Vlad's advice you will be ahead of the game, learn important new technologies, and somewhat future-proof your investment.

All of that gives you an extra $100 discount on the MBP vs. the normal student discount. If your willing to wait, there's usually a special extra promotion (like a free ipod nano in the last one) for students starting around june/july to sept. In the iPod nano case, if you sell it, you can get a $150 extra discount. Wait for the student promo and see what it is before you do what this guy says. (Also newegg.com or ncix.com is a better deal than crucial)

If you get the 17inch high resolution Macbook Pro or the Mac Pro, you're talking about savings of $400-$500 by my estimate.

6) Join Microsoft DreamSpark and get the following for free because you're a student: Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Windows Server 2003, MSoft Expression Studio, XNA Game Studio (https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/). Fill out your Windows VM with the dev tools.

That is actually one of the steps. :) But I've been waiting for "instant approval" from JourneyEd for two weeks now for Microsoft's DreamSpark program.

Please post the steps soon :)

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