So your back in college and you need a computer. So what to buy well it’s always a tough choice, but you don’t need to go into the thousands for a PC these days. the lower end laptop will do the job for most things, and the way to go here is low end.
- Keyboards: if your buying a laptop be sure to try it out and make sure you actualy type on it, and be sure to type a paragraph on it, cause if it’s a bad keyboard your stuck with it for 3-4 years.
- Touchscreens, yes the are here, you have to search them out as they are not on many lower end specks. Windows 8 will work better with them rather than a normal screen so it is worth the investment.
- Memory, go for as much memory as you can, Memory is not hard disk space, we’re looking here at on-board memory, it will be quoted like 4096MB which is More than enough if your running windows 8, also make sure you can expand it.
- Hard drive space: Don’t worry about hard drive space 160GB will be enough for most people, if your into music and video, you can always get an external USB drive. USB if you can come across USB 3.0 on a system, then that’s a plus.
- Screen size, rember the bigger the screen the more its going to cost to replace it if some one sits on it, of if it falls off the bed/desk or what ever!, a 17inch screen is going around €200 for a replacment, and its not an easy job, also if you can buy a standard screen size you will pay standard money to replace it.
The next thing is software:
- Have a look at www.studentsoftware.ie/ This is a site for purchasing student software at discount prices.
- Office software, well Microsoft office is the standard, but you can use open office or libre office, once you have made sure that you save everything as Microsoft file format and it will work fine.
- Photo-shop is a standard but GIMP gives you all the functionality that most people need, it’s also open source.
- The Zotero plug-in for Mozilla FireFox, is great for citations.
- LYX is great for producing papers and Theseus, and is much better at handling documentation than word.
- If your a publisher look at scribus, its open source desktop publishing system, you could always pay for quark.
Happy shopping, and don’t spend too much!