i agree the test should be "which sounds correct", not "better". They should also test and record with a mic first to prove that what the subjects are hearing is in fact different. If you play two mp3 tracks and people say "none sound like the original", then you know people can detect the loss due to compression. Which is also an argument for buying better equipment to play audio on. In theory, the more expensive the audio equipment, the more accurate the reproduced audio should be, just like FLAC should be able to reproduce the original audio better than mp3 at any bitrate. Which is why it's important to listen to the audio equipment in the store first, to make sure you are spending your money in a way that goes with your listening preference.

i have a pentium 1 laptop (100mhz, 32mb ram i believe) that I was able to run DSL on and NetBSD. I tried installing debian but it ran for 3 days grabbing packages so i finally just killed the install.

i still use my original xbox as my media box with XBMC. The main downside is the slow processor which limits what can be decoded, but there is a pretty good HOWTO in the wiki for tailoring the settings of h.264+ac3 for output on the xbox.

I have a Brother MFC-7840W and can confirm that Brother has great OS X, Linux, and Windows support. My OKI C8800 also works very well on all three, but isn't quite a consumer model printer. So, I wouldn't discount OKI right away either.

i have ATT and live in PA with a MD number. I only pay PA tax on my line.

Apart from not bringing the laptop to class, how about you don't take it out during class? If people don't see it, they won't know it's there and they won't ask to use it. I'd bet they are already trained on asking you so they'll ask you for a few weeks even if they don't see it, but keep saying "sorry i didn't bring it" and soon they'll learn to rely on other resources.