<p>Someone told me that if your child is going into something like graphic design you should get a Mac and I wondered if there would be other majors that are better suited to a specific computer. My son in going business school, any recommendations for a good laptop for business?</p>
<p>It really doesn’t matter anymore what kind of laptop you have for school. A ton of people on campus have macs, they work fine but are expensive. Dells are inexpensive but lack the aesthetic and sometimes functionality of macs. It’s a trade off, but regardless, any new laptop, even a netbook(mini laptop), would be fine. With the kind of computing power the laptops now-a-days have, there is no “business” laptop or “graphic design” laptop, there is only gaming laptop or general computing laptop.</p>
<p>a netbook would definitely not cut it for graphic design</p>
<p>I’d recommend at least 2 gigs of ram and a decent processor</p>
<p>for business though… anything will work really</p>
<p>With Photoshop CS, it would actually be fine. I was running CS2 on my parents computer which has a 1.4 GHZ Athlon and 384 mb of ram, and it ran reasonably well. A netbook with an Atom or VIA proccesor is much better than a 8 year old athlon.</p>
<p>For business, you could get basically anything with a Core 2 Duo and a 1 GB RAM. Depending on the budget, you could spent only $250 netbook and that would suffice (mainly for surfing the web, checking email, typing documents, etc.). However, if he wants to watch videos on it or play games, I’d settle for a $500-1000 Dell or HP laptop. </p>
<p>Word of Advice. Do NOT spend over $1500 on a laptop, unless you’re wanting to do graphic design which you’d need both a chipset and a dedicated graphics card (which Macbooks have) or you want a desktop replacement. The value of the laptop immediately depreciates the second you buy it, so it wouldn’t be worth it in the long run.</p>
<p>Yeah chipsets are super important to have!!!</p>
<p>You know, because, every computer, phone, and mobile device has a “chipset.”</p>
<p>Not every computer has a chipset. The chipset is mainly used to conserve power and to increase battery life. Laptops with dedicated video cards only have around 1-3 hours of battery life (photo & video editing, gaming, etc.).</p>