<p>[1] Should I bring a laptop or a desktop to Harvard?</p>
<p>[2] What requirements should I have for my computer?</p>
<p>[3] How is the wireless network at Harvard??</p>
<p>[4] What percentage of students bring laptops to class?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It's your personal choice. Personally, I would choose laptop.</p></li>
<li><p>Harvard will send computer requirements recommendations in your acceptance package.</p></li>
<li><p>Pretty good in the academic buildings. They were still getting some of the dorms up on wireless this year.</p></li>
<li><p>Not sure.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Harvard has T3 or T1, i forget, when i was there for summer school, my friend was downloading and uploading at 1GB/s, that's not a spelling mistake 1 GB/s, not MB</p>
<p>1 gig?</p>
<p>You sure?</p>
<p>thought process, s/he is probably saying one gigaBIT, not gigaBYTE. A bit is eight times smaller than a byte. Though you'd probably be better off asking someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Still, that seems to be quite a fast wireless connection.</p>
<p>Can a hard drive even read/write at 1 GB/second?</p>
<p>This info is slightly out of date, but generally accurate:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.fas.harvard.edu/computing/about/statistics/survey03.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.fas.harvard.edu/computing/about/statistics/survey03.html</a>
(15% of students bring laptops to class.)</p>
<p>Bring a laptop; you'll feel pretty stupid dragging your desktop to the fifth floor of Canaday.</p>
<p>If you're planning on getting a new computer, wait until you've been issued a student ID number and then buy an IBM Thinkpad from <a href="http://www.computers.harvard.edu%5B/url%5D">www.computers.harvard.edu</a>, since you can get like 40% discounts.</p>
<p>Wireless installation in the dorms is progressing very quickly. I'm not allowed to give details, but let's just say it would be reasonable for you to expect wireless access in your dorm.</p>
<p>Phoenixy-That survey is great, but one of the results was puzzling. It says that 71% of students use the UNIX app Pine for email, which I find hard to believe.</p>
<p>Believe me, it's true. The university webmail sucks--it's very slow--and students generally check their e-mail from kiosks and computer labs all over campus, where they can't use clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, but where terminal applications are installed, so Pine is the only alternative. The school's been pushing webmail pretty hard and even improving it a bit lately (you'll notice that Pine and UNIX use drop precipitously with the newer entering classes), and we're starting to endorse and support Thunderbird instead of the clunkier Eudora, so I expect this trend to continue. With the rise of Gmail, many students are also forwarding their Harvard e-mail (with a maximum 200MB quota) to Gmail accounts.</p>
<p>(I work for computer services, in case you're wondering how I happen to know this stuff.)</p>
<p>I was there this summer and there was no wireless in any of the dorms I visited. I guess they much be working pretty hard to get taht wireless system in. It would rock to have a wireless system everywhere because of the ease.</p>
<p>lehighs webmail is also horrible when not hardwired</p>
<p>so did we get that 1 GB/sec thing cleared up?
can an hd even read/write at 1 GB/sec?
heh, I know for sure that neither 802.11 a, b, nor g can do that...</p>
<p>I want to try, it would probably melt the processors</p>