<p>Hey im the first college kid in my family and have never bought a laptop. Does anyone wanna help me figure out what works best/share their experiences and or opinions about certain types. And please dont respond to this: "Well you should do what fits you best", just tell me what you think...</p>
<p>I would advice spending some money on MS Onenote. It’s a cool program and pretty useful.</p>
<p>As for hardware, eh sorry can’t help you.</p>
<p>[edit: Don’t buy a Mac book pro just because everyone else has them… Only get it because you are really going to use it for media manipulation and other visual arts/ audio arts programs. Not needed for internet/word processor.]</p>
<p>i have two dells
i would get the new dell adamo with solid state hdd or macbook pro</p>
<p>look at specs but i’m guessing you’re not a CS major because you didn’t state it</p>
<p>If your kid is a Vanderbilt student, Dell will give you great discounts on laptops. Google it.</p>
<p>^Huh, I didn’t know that. Kinda wish I did now, though I’m not sure the knowledge would have really affected my decision. It’s only a 7% discount, after all.</p>
<p>Anywho, I just bought this yesterday: [ASUS</a> Eee PC 1000HE EPC1000HE-BLU002X N280 1.66GHz 10" 160GB HDD 1GB PC2-5300 (DDR2-667) 802.11b/g/ at ZipZoomfly](<a href=“Zipzoomfly.com”>http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10010058)</p>
<p>with the rebate and the 2 gig ram upgrade. The specs are exactly where I need them to be (I don’t want to game in college) and it’s fairly light – the ~9.5 hour battery life (though I hear it’s more like 6-7 in practice) is quite awesome also. A friend has one too and I can type just fine on it, so I’ll use it for basic we browsing, notes/essays, and that’s pretty much it (maybe some light photo editing and storage, I guess).</p>
<p>sony vaio z hands down
its light, small with great performance
consider vaio SR if z is too expensive</p>
<p>If you don’t mind a slightly smaller screen and can afford it, the Dell XPS M1330 is a very good, lightweight machine.</p>
<p>I would go with a used Thinkpad for less than $400.</p>
<p>We are going back and forth with laptop decision for son. Is a 5.8lb laptop (Dell) too heavy to lug around? Also, how often do students bring their laptops to class?</p>
<p>macbook, not pro, just the original before they stopped making them recently. 2.4 GHz, 13.3 in, 320 gigs, and iWorks, which is awesome except for iNumbers which isn’t as useful compared to Excel.
Costed a crapload of money though, but my parents paid for it so I’m not complaining.</p>
<p>My sons carry Macsbooks…not the most expensive versions…I used to think bigger screen was worth money, but my son regretted having the bigger heavier laptop–he started with a larger Thinkpad till it was stolen…they swear small and light is good.</p>
<p>stolen! Yikes - what safety precautions can we take? (besides the obvious… don’t let it out of your sight)</p>
<p>Locking your door whenever you leave even if it’s just to go to the bathroom is the best way to prevent theft.</p>
<p>OK…here is the deal. You MUST get your laptops on your homeowners insurance, and your kids laptops may indeed already be covered. You MUST impress on your kids that they should always back up their term papers and original work on thumb drives. Computers and hard drives crash. Dumb things happen. Thieves exist. Students get distracted with their huge social lives.</p>
<p>Theft varies a great deal from campus to campus. All you have to do is access the page for your campus police department and you can usually read a full disclosure report on every single week’s reported crimes. </p>
<p>Property crimes are fairly frequent at Duke. Sorry to say. The libraries are open to the public, and they are ■■■■■■■ for students stupid enough to leave their work and laptops when off to grab a fancy coffee drink or lunch. Keys and wallets disappear in gymnasiums. Parked cars are ■■■■■■■ for goodies inside. My son watched grad students at Duke return after a lunch break to find both of their laptops gone last spring. </p>
<p>Some campuses are idyllic and cut off from pedestrian and community traffic. Some campuses have very few instances of property crimes.</p>
<p>My son and his roommate’s laptops were stolen the very first day they went to summer jobs on Capitol Hill from their rental apt owned by WISH, an agency that places students in summer housing in DC every summer. It was an inside job. Work crews had been in there, someone associated with them had left some clues behind on their unauthorized “return” trip, and they even relocked the deadbolt on their way out. Nice! Welcome to our nation’s seat of government.</p>
<p>There is an itinerant population in the neighborhood of people being fed by local churches with serious drug problems and no incomes who simply walk the streets all day looking for unattended objects to steal once people leave for the offices within walking distance. </p>
<p>There are campuses where you can leave your wallet and your laptop on your study station all day long with zero chance of anyone touching them. You can drop your wallet into a locker and not really secure the locks and go for a run. I am thinking of Davidson, Washington and Lee and in some cases, my alma mater Furman just off my own radar and experience list.</p>
<p>There are other campuses where their openness to their surrounding town is part of their special charm and history…like Duke, Yale etc…They choose not to be fortresses but to be part of their home cities, and campus security is a constant effort…vigilance is a must, and colleges must be proactive to protect students. Personally, I think Duke should step up campus security more along the lines of Johns Hopkins’ efforts, but my son loved the entire life he had there so his experience is what matters.</p>
<p>My son will be a freshman at Vandy this fall. He just got a new MacBook Pro, and although it will be insured, he will be far from home, and replacing it would not be a simple process. I received a postcard in the mail today from Secure on Campus.com for dorm safes for $110. This seems like a viable option for securing valuables–but I don’t want his roommate, etc. to think he doesn’t trust them. Would he be ostracized for having a safe in his room?</p>
<p>Mac because I’m a proud elitest</p>
<p>I’m just going to throw it out there that I bought a Dell XPS 1530, which is extremely nice (but i guess im not a computer pro or anything…), and it came with a LoJack for Laptops program already in it? so i guess if someone steals it and reprograms it or whatever, the police will be able to find it for you. Like tracking chip kind of thing. Not sure. </p>
<p>And in response to the dorm room safes, my sister had one freshman year- which she ended up losing the key for anyways- but everyone joked about having a safe that you could pick up and run away with. Im not sure what the size of the safes that the school offers, but if they were big enough where you couldnt run away with them, itd be wasting wayyyyy too much space in a dorm room.</p>
<p>I don’t think we would consider the idea of a safe. Best defense is likely roommates who are good about locking doors. People need keys to access buildings in residential halls and are not supposed to let strangers in.</p>
<p>However, on my first college Parent’s Day (not at Vandy), there had been random people knocking on freshman doors and asking for money on a Sunday morn so they got in somehow. Many students were asleep but had gotten up, answered their room door and then fished out and handed money over…something about “working our way through college” was the story they were told…</p>
<p>You do not need a safe, waste of money, however, in your dorm rooms one of the drawers is lockable, so just go buy a basic combination masterlock for like 5 or 10 bucks, and you can put your laptop and your wallet and stuff in there if you are worried. I have not heard of anyone getting their laptop stolen though, I mean I know it can happen, but Vandy is a pretty honest campus overall.</p>
<p>You really need to take precautions against theft in dorms. I work for Absolute Software, the makers of LoJack for Laptops that bhud mentions, and our stats show that dorms are one of the top 5 places where laptops are stolen. When I was at college we left our rooms open all time…so trusting! It’s not the random stranger that you have to worry about, but the friend of someone in the dorm that’s wandering around and looking to see if any laptops are left lying about. </p>
<p>Here’s a few tips to keep laptops safe in dorms:
- Get a cable lock and use it
- Engrave your drivers license inconspicuously on the computer (some schools have the campus police come around and do this the first semester)
- Get LoJack like bhud said - we have so many students computers that we’ve gotten back for them. Either buy it with the computer or call the campus bookstore to see if they have a discounted version of it. Or you can use coupon “LoJack 15” on the [Absolute</a> Software site](<a href=“http://www.absolute.com%5DAbsolute”>http://www.absolute.com).</p>