I also have a Brother MFC and it's the best investment we've made. Actually, Dell sells an MFC at a much cheaper price, but we had to give it up because the scanbed doesn't support legal size paper (but the ADF does). Dell's MFC also comes with PaperPort. You can probably purchase from Dell with some back to school bargains (check the discount deal sites like techbargains, xpbargains, fatwallet, etc.). Even the cheapest laser MFC is a network printer (although scanning requires USB connection)--which means you can connect both via ethernet and USB, the ethernet is for printing for all the other systems on your LAN and the USB is for your Windows box. I also second the suggestion about Adobe Acrobat, it's the best piece of software out there, even though it's a Windows only piece of software.