You can bake them some cookies or take them out to dinner, but you probably want to make sure you can pay them back with something that's equally hard on you and helpful for them, like helping them hide a prostitute they killed, or maybe just something else on this list.

If you're in high school, this can probably be expanded to just "the friend with a car."

Tom's Hardware might have tests on three of the things you're looking at, while CNET has a brief comparison of five things from last year, only two of which are still on the market, while you have to piece together how good the other ones are based on a hodgepodge of single reviews from random other sites and some shitty, unreliable user reviews.

This is why I had Pat. Pat was a friend of mine who would read this stuff all the time and loved it. I could have made fun of him for enjoying something I thought was boring, or I could tell him I needed a new graphics card that could play World of Warcraft but didn't need to play Crysis (this was a while ago) and 10 minutes later he would send me a link of exactly the right thing to get, and I would learn to celebrate the differences that make us human. Making fun of people for liking different things can be a great time, but it does close a lot of doors.

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Weirdo? Or someone who can teach you a valuable lesson in how to tell the difference between a woman and a "woman"?

Aside from purchases, obviously your computer-knowing friend can help you fix your computer if it's broken. Sure, you could take it to the Geek Squad, but you have to pay them money, and who knows what they're doing to your computer in the back room when you're gone.

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I'm just saying, you don't know.

Just because you don't have to pay your friend, though, doesn't mean you don't have to show some gratitude. Computer-fixing friends can feel just as put-upon as pickup truck friends. If they don't need a murder covered up, maybe you could find something else they'd like. For Pat, I spent years helping him achieve a goal that was strangely important to him -- trying to understand "Yours til Niagara Falls" jokes -- because sometimes when you are really good at computers, you can be a bit behind on other things.

Don't shut this out if you're a computer expert yourself. There's bound to be some area of expertise you don't have a handle on -- maybe home improvement or cars or understanding a very narrow genre of corny jokes. I'm sure someone would be willing to arrange a trade.

If you somehow find a friend who isn't working, knows how to take care of kids/pets and is willing to give several days of their life to watching over your kids/pets, do not lose this friend. If they have an annoying laugh or say "irregardless" all the time, just let it go. You should even go watch The Notebook or Epic Movie with them if they ask you.

Otherwise you will never go on vacation again.

You don't just need an insider for the connections, either. From the outside, it's easy to be really misled about what kind of jobs in an industry are easy to get, which jobs you'd actually want and what jobs even exist. A lot of people going into CG claim to want to be an "animator" -- which is entirely the wrong title for a lot of the work they want to do -- and are picturing a creative, goofy environment with people riding scooters and shooting Nerf guns at each other all the time, when most of the entry-level jobs are going to be in what are basically first-world sweatshops.

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Where you only get two massages a week. No, I'm kidding, they're actually sort of horrible.

Here is a story for you if you doubt the power of connections: I went to animation school with an asshole who gradually went insane over the course of the program. His animation was appalling, and when any teachers or students called him on it, he had a hissy fit and complained they were trying to sabotage him. However, he had a brother-in-law who was a lead animator at EA, and used him to get a plum animator job straight out of school. His brother-in-law probably regretted it, and apparently the EA folks had to spend some time beating some sense into the new guy, but he's still there. Next time you see some shitty animation in an EA game, remind yourself to try to make some friends in your dream industry.

I used to be bitter about that and tell myself that I looked down on them because they were trying to "cheat the system" and that I never did things like that because I was too honest, not because I was terrible at it. That's until I met some friends like that. "Oh, you're in a standard room?" they would ask. "That's ridiculous. I'll take care of this."

Via Starwood Hotels

And how!

There's a fine line between always asking for more because "it couldn't hurt to ask," and badgering people to the point of obnoxiousness, and a person who is willing to walk that line is a great friend to have. Especially at work.

If you get on the good side of your boss or someone else high up the ladder, they'll go to bat for you. In many places, your job advancement depends on a combination of doing a good job and office politics, and since most of us hate office politics or suck at it, or both, having a smooth-talking champion to advance your cause is a real gift. Now, I usually suggest getting on the good side of your boss by doing a good job and making his job easier, but blow jobs and brown-nosing would also work if you want to play it that way.

This is the kind of person who thinks of comparison shopping as a recreational sport. You might think it is a tedious chore, going from store to store, and website to website, reading fine print, trying to figure out which coupons stack, and following every Twitter update on Black Friday deals. But for this person, it is literally like a game. When they get a new gadget, they are less excited about the gadget itself than about the fact that they "scored" in getting it for 60 percent off.

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"I'm not even sure how this works but I won it for $10 in an auction."

The illegal variation of this is the person who's always able to find you pirated software, or electronics goods that "fell off the back of a truck." It might not be as good of an idea to take their deals, but it's the same personality type with slightly less scruples. My parents' neighbors are like this, and are always giving my parents a bunch of pirated DVDs unsolicited, because I guess it gives them a chance to talk about how they totally beat the system.

You can ask your friend to find a deal for you, or you can just absorb some of the tips they'll be happy to drop in conversation, and learn valuable lessons about how store-bought HDMI cables are a scam or that you actually don't save money buying a 20-pack of certain items at Costco.

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I guess it might be more convenient if you actually need 200 cans of tomato sauce.

You can miss out on so many wonderful tidbits in life if you're too busy worrying about people making you look like a knucklehead.

I think the sex version of "friends with benefits" is overrated. I'd rather have a friend who works at Adobe. Because Adobe employees can get any Adobe software package for $25, and if I get Photoshop CS5 Extended (list price $1000) from them, I've saved $975, which I can use on a pretty decent prostitute, or many, many hours of a more dubious prostitute.

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I think this picture is appropriate again.

Aside from the tons of places you'd like to have a friend "on the inside" for discounts, friends with service jobs, like doctors or lawyers, can also come in handy. Consider that you have to pay $200 to a lawyer just to ask him what he thinks about something, and you can see how handy it would be to have a friend who can save you the money and tell you that you have no case, or maybe just read through your house-buying documents or job contract for you. If you're in the creative industry, maybe they can help you set things up properly so you won't get your work stolen, and can solidly sue the pants off of someone if it happens.

When I bought my house, it happened to be from a friend of a friend of my parents, and she also happened to be a professional realtor, which meant she was able to hook me up with home inspectors, a title company, a loan agent, an insurance agent and make up a schedule for the whole thing, so I just had to show up when I was supposed to and sign papers. A year later, it looks like the right amount of money has gone out of my bank account so I think it's safe to say I haven't been cheated. If you've ever bought a house, you know what a hassle it is to track down all that shit, so you see why my mom has been badgering me to write this lady a thank-you card for the past two months. (I just put it in the mailbox, OK?)

Other great professions for friends to have include chef, tax accountant, Apple employee and assassin.

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Well, that guy won't cut you off twice.

For out what professions you might want to avoid, in 6 Dream Jobs That Would Actually Suck and The 5 Most Overrated Jobs Of All-Time.