<p>Hey, I'm shopping for a laptop (I'll be at Wellesley in the fall) and was wondering if a current student could tell me how often they carry their laptop around? Do students take their laptops to class/use them to take notes? Thanks for the help!</p>
<p>Some people take their laptops to class for notes, but not all that many. Most students transport them to and from study spaces. If you live far from home, laptops are much easier to transport during holidays and the summer.</p>
<p>Dell</a>, Gateway, and Apple all have special pricing for Wellesley students--be sure to look into it!</p>
<p>My laptop rearely leaves my desk. It's not as big as my roommate's desktop replacement sized laptop, but it's not highly portable either. I'm not a humanites major, so I don't have to write many papers, and when I do, I take advantage of public comptuers with better keyboards than mine and upload all my files to my firstclass account. People with laptops can be spotted in the library, and people with small laptops do yank them out on occasion, but the minifocus suits me just fine. My wireless also doesn't believe in connnecting to networks, despite recognizing them.</p>
<p>I've been asked to bring it to class once (by Olin and Babson professors who didn't realize that Wellesley didn't have a manditory laptop thing). I know two students who took notes on a tablet pc my first year (one's tablet has since broken), but it's not the norm.</p>
<p>I was't going to take my laptop at first to Wellesley, instead lending to my sister who was going abroad and taking her desktop computer. Having bought the laptop senior year with my own funds, I -erm- conviced my parents to let me take my computer, a good decision because the non-flat panel desktop monitor wouldn't have fit under the desk shelving (removable, but with no real place to go). My laptop doesn't fit under the desk shelving either, but it does fit in front of it. Of course two cinderblocks will fix the entire shelving issure if you do want to bring a desktop.</p>
<p>get an apple. best computing advice i could ever give. i LOVE my apple ibook G4.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for the responses! As a follow-up question, how necessary are color printers? Do any students bring their own, or do most rely on school printers?</p>
<p>The necessity of a color printer depends entirely on what you want to print. Academic work (lab photos, art slides, etc.) can generally be printed for free using the printers at either the SciLib or Clapp. Any personal printing is charged, at least at SciLib.</p>
<p>So ... if you want to print lot of pictures for your door, make greeting cards, or anything else like that, you're better off buying your own printer.</p>
<p>I had a printer for about a year and a half. I kept getting errors with it, and decided to send the waste of space home, despite my parents' slight bewilderment.
I also didn't figure out that printing was free until Spring Semester.
Color printers are not that necessary, and you need them just infrequently enough that printing something at the library is not that big of a deal.</p>
<p>Bought laptops each of the last 2 years for Ds. My experience was that Dell 'special pricing' was a joke. Their pricing was so bad that I broke away from them after buying Dell exclusively for several years. Bought a Toshiba for D1 2 years ago, decent, good price, service is available locally, and excellent. Bought a Gateway last year for D2, very nice machine for a good price, but service is halfway across the country via mail, and a nuisance to deal with. If there was a D3, I'd be buying Toshiba without question. Be sure you buy the 4 yr warranty.</p>
<p>i have a toshiba (w/ the 4 year warranty that twr suggested) and i love it. it's one of those tablet pcs and my second toshiba. my only problem w/ their computers is that they tend to over heat (a common problem for toshiba apparantly, but still annoying). there are ways to remedy this, of course. oh, and i'm pretty sure that the warranty i bought covers accidental problems (e.g. water spillage, dropping, etc). i don't know if this is the case for all other warranties, but it's worth looking into. good luck!</p>
<p>I'm going to second the four year warranty, at least for a tablet. The friend with the broken Toshiba had a tablet and had to buy a fan for it (before it had broken). The special windows Tablet OS works just fine on the Wellesley network. Her version did not come with any sort of CD drive (First Class is my hard disk though). I imagine the tablets do break easily simply because their portablilty leads to continual abuse.</p>
<p>I've gotten by just fine for 3 years without a printer - I fly to and from school and just don't have the room to store it along with my fridge, bedding etc. I network my laptop to the printer in my dorm and print color jobs in the library. It's really not a big deal.</p>