Laptop for College

[smithy]

Hi all,

I'm mainly a desktop kinda guy. So, when I recently found out my university is requiring the purchase of a laptop for the upcoming semester, I got a little worried.

I'd like something with a current (read: able to play games about as well as can be expected) video card without breaking the bank.

What about the different "name brands": Dell, Gateway....?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, but I'm more into writing this post for the personal experiences that some people here may have. I can google information as well as the next monkey. :)

Thanks,
Smithy

[pakman]

<rant> Your college "requires" a laptop? Where are you attending and what major would "require" a laptop? Everyone may not be able to afford a laptop.</rant>

I think that the only thing you will be able to get is a "name brand." It's kinda hard to put together your own laptop from pieces at the store or from the 'net. From what I have seen people using at Purdue, Sony Vaios seems like good gaming rigs. Dell also puts out some nice laptops that are good for gaming. Those are really the only ones that I see.

[Mephista]

http://pctorque.com/products.php

I've been eyeing these computers for a while. They're billed as "desktop replacements" and are pretty powerful. There are some negatives to them. They're heavy (7-8+ pounds), they're quite expensive, they get really hot when you run them, and they eat battery (1-3 hours). You can't upgrade as easily as a PC. Some pros are that the bigger ones have full size keyboards and they have really nice displays. And, yeah, they're powerful.

If you've heard of the brand Alienware, these are similar... only no glowing eyes and a smaller price. I suspect it's the same hardware (Sager).

[LochnarITB]

I suspect it's the same hardware (Sager).

Heh, I was going to reply with the link for Sager but refreshed before doing so and found your post. If I were to replace my current notebook, I would look very seriously at them. They are definately not easy on he pocketbook but no notebooks are, especially ones that seem to cover all the bases. A notebook is not a place you want to go on the cheap anyway. A notebook used to its potential takes a lot of abuse, both heat and physical. It takes quality compnents to stand up to the torture.

[smithy]

" <rant> Your college "requires" a laptop? Where are you attending and what major would "require" a laptop? Everyone may not be able to afford a laptop.</rant>"

I go to Clemson University getting a degree in computer science. Some classes the school offers require laptops, but not all of them do. Also, all incoming freshman from this year on are required to purchase a laptop.

The school has negotiated some decent prices with IBM but they aren't really the kind of machines I'm looking for.

If you're interested, laptop.clemson.edu has all of the information / justification.

Smithy

[Bob]

Can they even do that?
Has someone actually challenged them over it?
What if they'd accepted you and you DON'T get a laptop? Are they going to kick you out?

I don't know how the college/university admission system works in the US, but I doubt that someone would get away with that here - conditional offers tend to revolve around exam results, not ownership of a laptop.

Moreover, students quickly learn how advantageous it is to have everything on a laptop that they can take everywhere - home, dorm, class, library, etc...

advantages: Portable
disadvantages: More expensive, less powerful, less ports, less expandability, runs off batteries which run out.

Requiring everyone to own a desktop PC, and then lending out a tablet PC to everyone which could run as a dumb terminal in lectures would be a far better solution if you're going to require anyone to have a computer at all. I have a friend who's seriously considering ditching his laptop in favour of pen+paper in lectures and a proper desktop machine to actually work on - the only real prohibitative factor is the cost of buying a second machine while still at university.

But then I suppose that if you're going to a US university & are already splashing out for the actual education, a cheap-ish laptop is but a drop in the ocean. (Or so I hear, from potentially badly informed sources - but they're the best sources I have to go on).

It still seems highly unfair though - if they insist on you having an expensive piece of equipment they should be providing it - I still think it's unfair that my high school required every pupil past year 9 to own a £5 scientific calculator, but I'm a skinflint.

-Bob

[Nystul]

I don't know how the college/university admission system works in the US, but I doubt that someone would get away with that here - conditional offers tend to revolve around exam results, not ownership of a laptop.

If laptops are required, one might assume they will actually be used in the classrooms, in which case it would probably be a good idea to fulfill the requirement. There isn't much use in getting admission through a lawsuit and then not being able to complete your course work :) A cheap laptop costs about the same as a year's worth of textbooks, maybe less. Tuition for a year could cost... I don't even know these days, maybe 20-50 times as much as a cheap laptop at some private colleges. It's not a drop in the bucket, but only a few more payments on your 10 year student loans.

Personally though, I would try to get an idea of the most extensive things the laptop will be used for in class/lab, and determine whether I can get something cheap to do the trick. I'd rather get the cheapest thing I can and use it for course work only, and upgrade my desktop system for gaming, than get a tricked out laptop that can do everything. It depends on the situation, though.

[Rhydderch Hael]

What would be wondrous is if, if students are required to purchase a notebook compy there, then there would be no need for them to buy textbooks. Relevant reference material and texts would be made available via school intranet or distributed by the professor in CD copies that are copied into the hard drives.

Still have trouble envisioning a gaggle of students typing their notes during a lecture. Feels too much like stenography school.

By the by, I've learned from personal experience that a ThinkPad has a keyboard that is horrible to type on when you're drunk. WebPage-Forward and WebPage-Back keys set alongside the cursor arrow keys? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Chances of you losing the page while trying to bactrack in a text box for editing purposes are great when you have the fuel of an XLR-II rocket engine flowing in your veins.

[Munkay]

My vote is for an IBook or a Powerbook (if you have the money for it)

If you wait till august, Mac puts out deals on their website for students. Last year any ibook or powerbook came with a 99$ printer, and a 200$ certificate towards an Ipod. Good deal if you ask me.

I fell in love with my (at the time) girlfriend's powerbook. It was light, had amazing battery life, soft touch keyboard, great software packages, and one hecka-of-a fast CPU. Oh, and read down to find out how it fairs against beer.

--

What would be wondrous is if, if students are required to purchase a notebook compy there, then there would be no need for them to buy textbooks. Relevant reference material and texts would be made available via school intranet or distributed by the professor in CD copies that are copied into the hard drives.

I had a writing teacher who gave us a cd of material. We still had to buy quite a few books for class though, which he attritubted to the publishing companies hating the electronic (and highly transferable) medium. Whether this is true or not, there were too many books that were translated to pick just any electronic version. Translations are already horrible, even with decent translators.

Still have trouble envisioning a gaggle of students typing their notes during a lecture. Feels too much like stenography school.

If you ever come to Boston, I invite you to sit in on any of the BU Law School Lectures. A friend of mine swore that he couldn't find one person in the 50+ person class without a laptop out. I've never seen it either, though I'm sure its a site to be seen.

By the by, I've learned from personal experience that a ThinkPad has a keyboard that is horrible to type on when you're drunk. WebPage-Forward and WebPage-Back keys set alongside the cursor arrow keys? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Chances of you losing the page while trying to bactrack in a text box for editing purposes are great when you have the fuel of an XLR-II rocket engine flowing in your veins.

From experience powerbooks are tanks. They are well designed and easy to type on while intoxicated. Also if you happen to spill a beer all over the keyboard, your girlfriend will never find out. the keyboard is designed perfectly against leaks. There was not one resulting issue from the beer incident. And THAT is a type of computer you want for college . . . a partner in crime. :P

-Munk

[gekko]

Once you go mac, you'll never go back.

gekko

ps my sister is going to africa for 8 months and is leaving me her 12 inch iBook. I'm currently "borrowing" (short term) my father's 17 inch powerbook... I'm going to need stronger glasses to adjust.

[Bob]

Still have trouble envisioning a gaggle of students typing their notes during a lecture. Feels too much like stenography school.

That would be because typing notes is a pain. Unless you want to only have text in fixed lines, or have to try and draw pretty circles to draw diagrams.

The future, is tablet PC's and a desktop machine to do all the hard processing/storage/writing things like coursework. I don't work for Microsoft (thought I'd get that out of the way) but OneNote, in OfficeXP looks pretty nifty (from reviews & screenshots & whatknot).
A quick explanation for those of you with eyes already boggling. OneNote is a bit like a souped up notepad. You use it on a tablet PC (or potentially a PDA),where you write on the screen. You then have nearly limitless pages of book to write/draw/doodle on and the programme just stors the images of the page for you to flip through, saving as you write so that you're unlikely to lose more that a letter. But, whilst it's doing this, it's also turning your handwriting into text, to be bumped into word to write your notes up good and proper afterwards.
It also has machine understandable marks for important stuff and lots of other nice features.
But, the crowning glory (for now), Is the audio recording. The programme records the whole audio of the lecture, and indexes it against when you wrote something, so you can listen to the entire lecture again, and see your notes come up at the relevant point, or you can look at a note and have it play back what was being said when you wrote it.
It also has the ability to interface with other bits of software, so you can put snippets of websites up, PowerPoint slides and (although not here yet, but and certainly right around the corner) the 'page' from an interactive whiteboard. All time indexed again to when notes were made.

A far more efficient way of taking notes, and each lecture worth can be exported as one file to be archived away for later reference.

So, what's the disadvantage? it requires a tablet PC, which for now cost an absolute fortune (£2,000+ starting prices).
So, there's a lovely gap in the market for some ingenious entrapeneur (yeah, I know I didn't spell that right, OneNote's probably got a spellchecker in it too, although I don't know. It could easily have been overlooked since they're taken for granted these days) to start selling cut down tablet PC's, just a 10" or 12" (maybe even 8") LCD screen, a battery, some RAM, a ROM or solid state memory, wireless networking & a low-power processor (a 1GHz-y crusoe chip would be nice). With this, comes a pretty powerdul, but otherwise basic desktop PC (the kind of stuff that PCWorld sells - good for work & a few limited applications, worthless for anything else). With high-bandwidth wireless networking and some proper security protocols, and entire campus could have a tablet PC with them as a digital notepad & a decent desktop PC actually doing everything - and it means that everyone actually has a computer for doing computer things, rather than a fiddly laptop & a tablet PC for taking notes on, which is easier than typing, because writing is more 'free'.

A desktop PC with the same specifications as a laptop will cost several £100 less than the laptop - such a basic tablet type thing would probably only cost that much to produce - the most of the additional cost of the things is the minaturisation of most of a computer into such a small space - if it isn't actually most of a computer a) there's less b ) it doesn't have to be as minaturised.

This also means that the actually computer bit is more accessable (i.e. you can repair/upgrade it yourself), and the bit which is more likely to get dropped
1) doesn't contain as much so would be less expensive to repair
2) isn't the vital bit, if you do end up smashing the tablet, you can still write on real paper & scan it in (if you want) and you're not totally with a computer.

The main things needed for this all to happen are:
1)Broadband WI-FI (and potentially better internet links, as the same principle would apply using wireless hotspots all around the globe)
2)Someone to start making 'just-the-marrow' bare-bones tablet PC's
3)Someone else to srite all the integration stuff
4)Another smart person to sell this with a cheap-but-decent desktop PC
5)The nice people at Microsoft to start allowing 'dumb terminal licenses' for free with a copy of XP, an extra £100 for a second copy of windows is the one thing that could really screw this plan up.

The other advantage is that the dumb terminals won't beceom obsolete very fast, so universities can invest in the tablets & rent (ot just require a deposit) on them, and the students need just bring a cheaper & better desktop PC with them.

Simple, Effective, Efficient, Potentially cheaper.

You can see that I'm excitied by the prospesct of tablet PC's, can't you?

-Bob

[smithy]

I tend to agree that it is a little silly for the university to require everyone to get a laptop. However, given all the other costs that tend to go along with higher education (books, tuition, rent, food, etc...), it seems to me that making everyone get a laptop isn't that much of an extra burden.

Then again, I am lucky enough to have parents that are going to help me purchase one. If I had to front the entire cost myself I doubt I could afford one.

Anyway, I don't really mind because now I can play WoW during class. :)

Smithy

[smithy]

Thanks for the info Mephista + Lochnar. It looks as if Sager is the notebook for me.

I have my heart set on this monster:

http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/noteboo...roductType=4750

17.0" LCD
Athlon 64 3400+
1024 MB PC3200
60gb 7200 HD
4x DVD writer

Kinda sad, this thing would completely blow my desktop away.

Think I'll have enough power for word processing...? :unsure:

Smithy

[smithy]

Hey Munkay,

Sorry but Smithy = PC fanboy :)

Although, I will be trashing XP home the second I can and dual booting XP Pro with some Linux Distro.

Smithy

[Munkay]

No offense taken. :)

If I had 2k to toss around on a laptop, you'd bet your money I'd get the same PC. That's ridiculous! (in a good way)

Enjoy, :rolleyes:

-Munk

[yangman]

My vote is for an IBook or a Powerbook (if you have the money for it)

I'd like something with a current (read: able to play games about as well as can be expected) video card without breaking the bank.

Sorry, but I just can't resist. :ph34r: (Warning: profanity ahead)

Joking aside, them mac's are so appealing now that I'm considering purchasing one, if not for the above mentioned problem.

It's just impossible finding a good laptop that doesn't come bundled with things you don't want (more screen room than I'd ever want in a "mobile" device), yet still contain a few selected components that I won't be able to live without (above average graphics controller with discrete RAM). Of course, my dillema would be a non-issue if them little boxes didn't cost an arm and a leg, plus an eye after tax. Having more manufactures that retail in Canada would help also.

[kandrathe]

Hypersonic Aviator AX6 :) Sweet.

[JustAGuy]

What if they'd accepted you and you DON'T get a laptop? Are they going to kick you out?

They "required" certain books for my Computer Engineering course, and I never bought them. I turned out ok. :)

[pakman]

Take no offense. This is not directed toward you or anyone in particular. When I saw people with laptops in class they didn't take many notes. Instead, they played solitaire, minesweeper, etc. I even saw one guy play Planetside, I don't know how he did it, but he had a pretty good KDR :P About a year ago, one of my friends and I were in the same class, he happened to have a laptop. Instead of paying attention to class we surfed the internet, coincidentaly, I surfed these very forums. I got the impression that laptops in class were more of a distraction than a useful academic tool. I think it is much faster to write notes on paper, then transfer that to the computer. Transferring the notes can be used as a study tool. I personally could never type that fast to kleep up with the notes. <aside> From my own experience, power point presentations suck at getting complex information across.</aside>

However, laptops are good when you want to go to group meetings and do everything else that you use for course work. The onloy thing I have against laptops is that while you can make them great for games, it can be hard to play on them, otherwise they do whatever any other computer can do.

But maybe in CS there is a use in class for getting demos of the material so that everyone can see how things work and can dissect it at their leisure later.

There was a person who brought up putting class texts onto cd or some other digital format. I highly disagree. While assignments can be put into a pdf format, a whole book in pdf defeats the purpose. First of all, you might still have to buy the $0.10 cd for the normal book price of $100+. Secondly, it would be hard to ask for help from anyone. Lugging a laptop around with the cd in it, finding the page(s), asking questions, etc. I just think that laptops will be more efficient to take notes than pen and paper. <_<

[LochnarITB]

Hypersonic Aviator AX6&nbsp; :)&nbsp; Sweet.

I'll take one of those also, please. In Piercing Blue Metallic with racing stripes please. Oh yeah, kit it out with all the bells and whistles while you're at it. Now where did I put that $5,162 I had just a minute ago?

Very nice indeed. I am a firm believer in "He who dies with the most toys wins". I just wish I had the pocketbook to support that belief.