Laptop for College

LauraKc

Hi
I'm looking for advice whether or not I should buy a laptop for this September. I'm going into first year medicine.

I have an old sony vaio laptop but the screen is cracked so I would have to get it fixed. It is quite slow though so I don't know whether it would be worth paying the money to get it fixed. I rarely use it because I generally just use my ipad or my phone.

Could anybody advise me whether or not I really need a laptop for medicine. Do you get many assignments that you need a laptop for and do you need a laptop for lectures?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

otpmb

I'm in Second Year Med in Cork, we had like 1 assignment during the year and a couple of months to do it, this does increase though, as you go up the years. Honestly it depends on how you work, if you don't mind studying off a computer screen, I'd buy a nice light laptop, with a good reputation (Toshiba, Apple etc), if you prefer studying with paper buy a decent printer (with low ink costs) and a cheaper laptop. An iPad screen can be quite small, if you're trying to study but, I think it might be easier for taking notes in lectures. Make sure you download an app that allows you to write into pdf files, somebody who understands computers might explain where to find this.

Glowy

I'm in TCD med as well, an awful lot of my class use laptops for note-taking and annotating lecture slides but it truly depends on whether you prefer to work with paper or screens. The benefit of having a laptop would mean you'd be able to use pdf copies of textbooks rather than going to the library in James', which a lot of us found useful. You'll only have one or two essays and a long enough logbook to complete in terms of typed assignments. You'll also have to do research every week for tutorials (but you could probably manage that on the iPad). You shouldn't be too busy in the first few weeks, so maybe see if the iPad's enough on a trial basis?

159conor

If you're looking for a 12 inch powerful laptop with a nice keyboard fantastic build quality you this wouldn't be a bad choice a lenovo x201 thinkpad There cheep now on amazon now. Good luck with your course.

RoRo979

please dont get an ipad for college work. If you have the money a macbook air is a good,fast,light reliable laptop. If you have less money just get one with about 7hrs battery, at least 8gb of ram, at least an i5 processor and if possible some SSD