Buying a new laptop for multimedia in the class

How convenient it is for you to load up your presentations on your laptop at your home or office, bring the laptop to class, and plug it into a large-screen projection system! Even if a classroom has computer in it, you are unlikely to be able to install necessary software. Alternatively, if the administrators allow anybody to install new software, then the chance that it will work when you need it is vanishingly small.

If you do not have a laptop, or have one that is several years old, now may be the time to buy one. Prices have never been better; have you looked lately? Choices have never been so great. This large number of possibilities forces potential buyers to make choices, some of which are not obvious even to experienced laptop owners. There are several things that you can do to help you decide what to buy.

First, consider a 3-year horizon for the time you will use this laptop and write down how and for what purposes you will be using it. For example, will you use it to create multimedia or to just playback multimedia? Will playing multimedia simulations or games be a primary purpose? Will weight and size be important considerations? If so, you may want a small screen rather than the sort of 15-inch-and-up screen that can make a laptop suitable for being your main computer. With laptop CPU speeds of 1GHz or greater, this is just on the verge of being a serious possibility. Note that a laptop with a small screen and a docking station can let you use your existing large CRT display and keyboard as a respectable main desktop computer. Price the docking station ahead of buying the laptop though because some of these stations are not cheap.

Second, clip some advertisements from major laptop providers such as IBM, Dell, Gateway, and HP. Notice the price ranges. What makes an expensive laptop? Is it the hard drive, the processor, or some bells and whistles? You will find that the ranges of the featured laptops start at 800 MHz and go up to 1 GHz or greater. You will pay a premium for 1GHz this year, but maybe you don't need the added performance of 1 GHz over 850 MHz. A more expensive laptop may come with 30 GBytes of hard drive rather than 10 GBytes of hard drive. As laptop users for about 13 years, we usually find that hard drive space is what we run out of first, rather than CPU power. If you are going to be a power user, note that it is not only CPU power that determines your performance, but also RAM, where bigger is lots better, especially for multimedia. We would not settle for anything less than 256MB of RAM. While on the subject of performance, we should remark that a 1 GHz laptop will perform slower than a 1 GHz desktop because these desktop systems usually have faster internal system buses. We should also mention that if your use is playing back multimedia-enhanced Power Point presentations and creating Word documents, you might be very happy with one of the older model laptops that you can get for well under $1000. Just be sure to get one with at least 10 MBytes of hard disk.

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