I am buying a laptop for my college freshman -- what should I look for?
Answer:
I am partial to Dell, because they have one of the best service departments/contracts contained by the business. I would recommend that you stay away from their credit purchase department, though - pay bread even if you need to borrow it from somewhere else.
Anyway, you stipulation to look for 2 main things - memory, also certain as RAM for Random Access Memory, and hard drive space, also prearranged as HDD for Hard Disk Drive. Generally, my recommendation would be 1 GB (gigabytes) of RAM (which is in truth 1024 MB, or megabytes). You could get away next to less (512 MB) if in that are financial considerations, but this should be the last article you skimp on. As far as HDD capacity, I would recommend 60 GB, although you could drop this to 40 GB and still not be within bad shape (I am assuming that we are looking at primarily scholastic applications, not downloading movies or music) as far as space.
Think of a unyielding drive as a bookshelf, and memory as desk space. The bookshelf is where you store information, and the desk is where on earth you do your work. When you sit down to work, you start with a verbs desk, then turn to the bookcase to get anything you want to work on - letters, pictures, magazine, whatever. If you are looking at a picture and writing a epistle, if you want to open a magazine, you may own to put either the picture or the memorandum back, depending on how big your desk is, because you cannot cover anything on your desk -- you cannot put the magazine over the picture. If you want to open a tabloid, you may need to put everything hindmost. You may not even be able to depart the whole daily if you do not have satisfactory desk space. The bigger your desktop, the more information you can work on at one time. The bigger your desktop, the more things you can have overt at one time - you can see three pictures, two letters, a magazine, listen to a disc and play Tic-Tac-Toe all at one time, if it is big satisfactory. That is the way it is near RAM - the more you have, the more you can do, or the bigger and more complex the program(s) you can run. Now indistinguishable is true with your storage space. The bigger the bookshelf, the more information you can store for always. Once you finish working for the day, you hold to clean stale your desktop. That is what happens when you turn past its sell-by date your computer - you clear out your RAM, and you lose whatever you be working on unless you "saved" it to the hard drive, which is resembling putting it on the bookshelf.
You can think of processor speed as you brain dimensions, or your raw intelligence (remember we are speaking within loose analogies, here). Unless you are a rocket scientist, anything over a certain IQ is worthless. How much intelligence do you need to write a note or listen to a song or look at a newspaper? Same near processor speed. How much speed do you need to type a Word document, or playback a compact disc or a DVD, or watch a video clip online, or run a fundamental physics modeling software package? So you do not hold to buy the Pentium Core 2 Quad processor.
Everything else is more or less frills. If you are going to play games or do video editing, you have need of an upgraded video card and maybe nouns card, and maybe for a moment more RAM. If you are going to download movies or video clips, you may need for a time bigger HDD. If you want to print, you need a printer. If you want to attach deeply of peripherals (mouse, full-size keyboard, printer, etc) you may want to buy a docking station, and so on. You also may want to consider an extra battery-operated as a fairly dignified priority, and maybe even a spare power supply. What I hold talked almost are your basics, which will determine the workload dimensions of your laptop.
Good luck, and remember -
You can lose your love, you can lose your money, you can lose your home, you can lose your beauty, you can even lose your mind... but once you procure your education, it is yours forever! (I only made that up, but it is the truth)
Check with the conservatory to see what limitations they might have. They might also hold a recommended minimum requirements for a computer.
depends on what your college freshman's major/interests are in...the ground rules he/she will need are word processing/spreadsheet/present... programs (i.e. Microsoft Office / Open source programs, similar to linux, work just as good)
a CD/DVD player-- disc burner at least (DVD burner optional)
Also, capture him/her a flash memory stick---1G would be nice, but 512MB would do too
make sure it can play first personage shooters like quake, possibly even a MMORPG like world of warcraft, because when i go to visit my friends surrounded by college, thats about adjectives the compys were used for.. hah. Really though, capture dual core processor, large unyielding drive, dvd rom, and at least a gigabyte of push. Depending on the major, they might stipulation a good 3d pictographic processor (if they work with CAD or such programs).
One more article.get a GOOD one! It is unusable to think it should merely last 4 years! It should be angelic enough to final at least 4 years and a year or two more. The arts school will have minimums, do not buy of late that! Expand the memory to more and make the cpu faster too. External harddrives will cover most of their requirements but do not buy one less than 80 see. Also buy the larger battery. Think backpack too, they call for to get it from class to class undamagingly.
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