<p>I'm going to be heading off to college pretty soon, and I wasn't so sure if I should get a new laptop for back to school or not. The one I have right now still works pretty decently, but it's nearly 3-4 years old and it has a slow processor, so often opening up programs and loading stuff takes me a bit more time than I anticipate. Heck, just turning it on takes me a full 5 minutes (when laptops nowadays take only 60 secs to boot up) even when I clean and defrag everything! I guess I'm just patient but every now and then it's slowness makes me want to punch it. </p>
<p>However, my mom suggested that I should get a new laptop for college. All of the new laptops on the market have over 200+ GB of hard drive space, new i3, i5 etc processors, and amazing specs which make my current laptop seem so 20th century (seriously, less than 100GB of space, less than 2GB RAM, no webcam...)</p>
<p>I don't know if I should get a new one since mine still works fine but does occasionally lag, but getting a new, faster, one would be quite nice. Any suggestions?</p>
<p>Is it a windoze one, especially Windows Vista?</p>
<p>Some friend once told me that, these days, the computer software is such a beast that, the longer you have used it, the “entropy” becomes higher. Before you know it, the entropy (window registry?) becomes so high that the whole system becomes very slow. When the system is slow, more likely it is because of the system and application software (years of their uses), not because of the hardware. In this way, the software companies help the computer hardware companies to sell their products. In the mean time, since the software in a large net-worked company environment is too complicated to manage, the software companies can sell their consulting services. (I think this is this “service business” HP would like to get in right now, and leaves their computer hardware business to some third world companies – with the exception of Apple.)</p>
<p>Yeah, it’s a Windows. The first one is Vista and the “new” laptop I mentioned would be Windows 7. I’m not allowed to get a Mac since it’s too expensive for my parent’s taste.</p>
<p>It depends what you want to use the laptop for. If you’re a history major for example and use your laptop for research, writing in word documents, and social networking, pretty much anything will do. If you’re into games, or plan on studying engineering, definitely upgrade. Anything else is really a decision up to you. </p>
<p>I personally wouldn’t keep a laptop for more than four years…technology evolves at such a fast pace. But it’s really up to you, your parents, and your needs.</p>
<p>Jesus… Id upgrade ASAP. Regardless of major.<br>
Well I take that back, if your an engineering/CS major you MUST upgrade. But like marcdvl said. If your only writing word docs and such you can probably get away with what you got.</p>
<p>But seriously. Just for entertainment purposes alone: Movies, music, itunes and such. I imagine you can’t do a whole lot entertainment wise. Once you get to college your laptop/computer is gonna be large portion of your life. It needs to be able to support all of the crap your gonna be doing. I imagine you’ll need specific software for class. All your entertainment. Blah, blah, blah.
If you have a desktop then I suppose all of this doesn’t matter because you’ll only need your laptop for traveling to places. And a TV/game console would help entertainment wise. But still, Id upgrade regardless of major.</p>
<p>First of all - your laptop seems ridiculously slow. If you’re going to keep it, I’d install Ubuntu on it - the new OS will kill the “entropy” and Ubuntu doesn’t have the slow-down problem Windows does. (Unix systems, ie iOS, Linux in general don’t have that problem.) Ubuntu also happens to be free and comes with a lot of awesome free programs, etc.</p>
<p>But now does seem like a good time for a new laptop. Solid-state harddrives have been around for a while, and we probably don’t need to go to 128 bit any time soon, so it’s unlikely that computers will change “drastically” (in computer terms, obviously) in the next few years. I still curse myself for getting a laptop early, right before solid-state drives came out, as the solid-drive ones are so much faster.</p>
<p>However, if you do get a computer, I’d avoid the really, really cheap ones, as they also tend to be really, really slow. Go for something that is at least $500. </p>
<p>Really, it depends on what you want to do with the laptop. Serious gaming? Photoediting? Watching movies on your laptop? A new computer would serve you well. Writing papers? LibreOffice (also free) on Ubuntu would serve your purposes very well. I would disagree that a CS major absolutely needs to upgrade - all the CS majors I know run Ubuntu. </p>
<p>Also depends on your school. Mine, for example, actually uses Ubuntu on all the school computers, so it’s nice for me to have Ubuntu on my own system. (I dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu for a “best-of-both-worlds” thing, but then again I go to a school with the word “Technology” in it’s name.*)</p>