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Actually I can, and did, get a legitimate copy of Windows XP for $11 through a program my college has in place.

Not available to 99% of people who can build their own PC's let alone the general public..

And at least it'll have real software instead of that gooey Mac crap.

Wow, thats specific, OSX is more stable, and secure than Windows. I gave an OSX box to my 63 year old mother and I have had one call about an issue in the past year and a half. When she was on windows (2000) I was getting calls weekly.

I'm a sys admin for the computer science department at the local university.

Is it ok if I dont bow? I mean I was doing that a decade ago, and there are those around who were doing it a decade (or more) before I was so you'll pardon me if the 'Im a sys admin for a cs department' does not make the appeal to expertise you might have been hoping for..

We refuse to service Macs because it just adds to our headaches, espcially with networking.

I think your policy was written when apple talk ran free in the world. Given that Apple used the *NIX implementation of TCP/IP either

A) Nobody in your dept has looked at Apple in 3 years or
B) Nobody in your department is smart enough to network a UNIX box

If you're developing code you probably want a real computer.

Again you're forgetting that macs are running UNIX? Macs/UNIX are every bit the development environment that windows are (in my opinion more but I am a systems Architect now a developer)..

What the heck? I'm just telling you we don't take care of Macs because it adds too much complexity to an already confusing combination of three Windows OS, four or five *nix flavors, and hundreds of different pieces of hardware.

Windows and *nix can run on the same sort of boxes, which means when one dies, we can salvage the parts. Are we supposed to add a whole seperate line of incompatible hardware to service and upgrade?

A number of my acquantances have Mac laptops running Unix, which is why they got them. They have more problems than I do with my Dell laptop. My Dell can do everything their machines can do. I have Norton sitting on my system and it runs a scan once a week; it never finds anything. I don't know the last time I actually put in a Windows fix; it's not a problem. Heck, the only problems I've had with this machine have been hardware related.

Maybe you've had great experiences with Macs and bad ones with Windows. I like XP, it does what I want, without Mac issues.