Laptop Brand Not Important; Hard Drive, Ram Are

By JUSTIN WILLIAMS

Last week, a colleague in the Courier & Press Technology section offered advice for purchasing a laptop for college. While some of the advice was sound, I feel the need to rebut and offer my perspective as someone who is a few years removed from college.

During my years at Purdue, I used a laptop for the majority of my note taking and paper writing.

As for hardware, the brand does not matter. The hardware differences between a Dell, Toshiba or HP are nonexistent. Each manufacturer uses the same parts and shell to enclose the hardware.

Look for a machine that has at least 2 gigabytes of random- access memory (RAM) and ample hard drive space. The more RAM, the more programs can run concurrently without degrading performance.

If your student is planning to walk the campus with a laptop, steer away from the 17-inch offerings. The typical dorm room desk is small, and space is a premium. Seventeen-inch laptops are also notorious for being heavy and having incredibly poor battery life.

With respect to the choice of XP or Vista on a Windows-based laptop, there is no reason anyone buying a new computer for college should be seeking XP.

XP will be more than a decade old by the time the student finishes a four-year program. Downgrading to XP, if given the option, is irresponsible.

The security improvements in Vista’s universal account control (UAC) can be immensely beneficial on a freewheeling dorm room network that is potentially filled with viruses and malware.

UAC can be a bit annoying, with its persistent pop-ups asking you to “Cancel” or “Allow” an action. But given the choice of a few mouse clicks or spending the night reinstalling Windows because your machine has slowed to a crawl with spyware, the answer is obvious.

If you want to avoid the security issues altogether, buy

a Mac. It runs Microsoft Office, surfs the Web and checks e-mail just as well as any Windows PC on the market.

If you need to run a Windows-based program as part of the curriculum, there is a product available that will allow newer Macs to run Vista or XP on top of OS X. It’s called VMWare Fusion (www.vmware.com/products/fusion/).

Windows in what is known as a virtualized environment is a better way to run the OS.

Fusion has a feature called “Snapshots” that creates a clean, sterile backup of a Windows installation in case you install an errant piece of software or become infected by malware.

Whether you choose a Mac or PC, let the student make the final decision on what works best. If I were going back to school, I’d be looking at an Apple MacBook or any off-the-shelf PC laptop, as long as it is light and has plenty of RAM.

Justin Williams is a local blogger and the owner of Second Gear, a local Web and software development firm. He can be reached at justin@secondgearllc.com.

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