Avoiding the Microsoft tax, but bought a copy of Windows to run in a VM?
Most universities have full-duplex 100Mbit+, and at those speeds it's not your connection that's the bottleneck, it's the latency of getting your request to the server and the server's available bandwidth. I imagine most routers are smart enough not to completely saturate the pipe with a single user's connection.
It's on connections like this where Peer-to-Peer systems like BitTorrent really come into your own. While no one server will saturate your 100 Mbit connection, 50 peers on your same ISP surely will.
Using Linux as the primary OS is not every time about
> Avoiding the Microsoft tax[...]
For me, it is the multidesktop support and great terminal emulators (like terminator) which make linux a very good OS, supporting me to get things done.
[edit: OK - Missed the line about this topic in the original text. coffee.]
Most universities have full-duplex 100Mbit+, and at those speeds it's not your connection that's the bottleneck, it's the latency of getting your request to the server and the server's available bandwidth. I imagine most routers are smart enough not to completely saturate the pipe with a single user's connection.