Laptop Buying Advice

Someone emailed to ask about my advice on purchasing laptops. I thought I'd repost my response here, in case anyone else was curious:

Basically all you need [to hook into the BSU network] is stuff that comes standard these days: wireless capability and an "ethernet" port that can plug into the network without wireless. I don't know what your budget is like, but if you're thinking in the neighborhood of $1000+, either an iBook or one of the Gateway laptops (like the M250E) that BSU gets special deals on would do very well for you. (You might stop in at the Computer Showcase Center on the first floor of RB--in room 134b--to get the skinny on BSU's special deals.)

Online Computer Showcase site: http://www.bsu.edu/web/ucs/showcase/

There are also some very cheap computer deals out there at places like Best Buy, and, if you're on a tighter budget, one of those might do for you, too, of course. But remember that the cheapest models are pretty stripped down.

My general advice is that you should get plenty of "RAM" memory--500 MB or 1 GB--since that's the memory that things actually run on: the more of it you have, the more smoothly your machine will operate with several programs running. I also recommend getting a good sized hard drive, probably 40 GB minimum, since people are putting more and more big files (video, audio, photos) on their hard drives these days.

(And if I were a freshman today my personal preference, in case you want to know, would be for a 14" iBook from the Apple store. BSU offers a good deal on them, and they're usually good, dependable machines, in my experience. Plus, they come with a lot of great software, automatically.)

You'll also have to buy the Microsoft Office suite (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), but BSU offers that for Macs or PCs at a cost of about five bucks.