My classes are starting to out do my HP Laptop Alot of the programs we run, crash it till it wont even reboot for ahile Im hopless when it comes to buying electronics. Anyone have any good reccomendations? Are touch screens a must? :santa_cheesy:
My son bought a Mac laptop for his combat medic training studies, and it performs great. It's much more stable. And it must be user-friendly because he is far, far from being a computer wizard. It may be a little more expensive, but anything that facilitates your educational success is money well spent! :santa_grin:
One of the reasons I bought my wife an iPad was for her university classes. She said she felt like an old lady lugging around a laptop while all the other students were using tablets.
A touchscreen is only necessary if you're running Windows 8, and even then, you don't really need it. The main thing you're going to want in a laptop is RAM. The higher the RAM, the better. If you gave a list of what programs you're having to use at school, it'll help folks with recommendations. Generally, however, if the laptop says its a netbook, you're not going to want it.
Really, for most people, whatever you can find in the $300-400 range at Best Buy will be more than enough. The only gripes I have about mine are that is has some proprietary software that is supposed to "help" it "work better". Most of the time this sort of thing just conflicts with what the OS will do itself. That and they apparently no longer make laptops with TrackPoint "joysticks" for mice and the touchpad on this thing makes me want to murder a hobo.
What is the deference in laptop and notebook? Sadly software changes pretty regulary. So based upon what I read... High Ram, Tell notebooks to go fuck themselves, and make sure it has a dedicated video card none of that intergrated whoring around
There are laptops, netbooks, notebooks, and ultrabooks. Confused? That's the point. I dunno what the official definitions are, but here's how I think about them: Netbook: A fancy toy that can connect to the internet. Doesn't have a DVD drive. Notebook: A portable computer that isn't too heavy. Most of these still have DVD drives, but not all of them do. Ultrabook: A really lightweight portable computer that is fairly powerful and usually very expensive. (Think a Macbook Air.) Almost none of these have DVD drives. Laptop: A generic term that covers all of the above in most people's minds. So, what you want is a notebook or an ultrabook, depending upon your budget. The videocard issue is really only important if you're going to be doing things like video editing or playing the latest video games. A dedicated videocard isn't important if you're only going to be doing things like text editing, surfing the web and watching the occasional movie on your machine.
On the software side, if there's no Mac version of a program that you want to run, then you'll have to buy a copy of Windows, install it on the Mac and then install your program on to the Windows side. Its not too difficult to do, but more expensive. On the hardware side, Apple products tend to be more expensive than similar machines running Windows. You get a few benefits with that higher price, as the customer service for Apple stuff is usually better than for PCs, but if you don't plan on calling tech support for help, it may not be worth it for you. Mac's also have fewer USB ports, and no Blu-Ray drives, I'm not even sure you can hook one up via USB and have it work.
Shakes, for school a Microsoft laptop would be easiest. No compatibility BS and the cost of the operating system is already built into the machine, so you don't have to buy the Mac first and THEN throw another $100 at Microsoft just to run some programs. I'd go to http://shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops and select a price range you like. Let us know what programs you need to run and we can probably find something in your price range. Alternatively, you can build a PC for about as much.
That sort of software is annoying as hell and usually requires an update as soon as you turn the computer on. I miss those. But my semi-new touchpad is kind of nice because it has scrolling along the right-hand side, fast scrolling if you do weird loop-de-loops, and zooming. I think Dell copied it off of Apple or something, but it's super convenient.
