Computer Advice for incoming (or old) students

Questions to ask yourself:

Desktop or laptop?
Windows, OS X or Linux?
Do you plan on using your computer for something other than homework (games or such)?

Desktop or Laptop ?

Answer to this depends on the way a student works - from home/dorm or school. Another critical factor that influences this is the amount of travel. Personally, I have both - initially I just had a desktop but laptop gave lot of flexibility while travelling (attending workshops/conferences, etc) and helped me make learn a lot more from such events. Currently, my desktop, apart from being used for research/sys-admin related purposes, runs my webserver; while my laptop serves as my mobile work place.

Windows, OS X or Linux?

Depends on whether packages/software you need for your work (school/home/entertainment, etc) are available for that particular platform and more importantly, how comfortable one with it. Personally, my deskop is a pure linux box (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), laptop used to be a dual boot (Windows XP Home and RHEL) but I have now moved over to Mac laptop...

Robert Pastel 2003 Machine and Advice:

When building or selecting your machine consider the highest demand task you will perform on the machine. For example image processor requires large amount of RAM, while playing first person shooters games requires a good video card and monitor. Most school work, for example writing papers or developing programmers does not require a powerful machine. You will do well with a $500 machine for most school work. Also consider how many tasks you will simultaneously work on.

The machine listed below was design to play games well and perform image processing. I typically work on several tasks simultaneously. In other words the machine is powerful and is not cheap.

The machine was constructed Decemeber 2002. Prices are 2002 prices.

Component	Model	Cost
Processor	INTEL PENTIUM 4 2.4B GHZ	$202
Mother Board	ASUS P4PE	$148
RAM	512 MB DDR 2700 Kingston	$123
Video	ASUS V8420-DELUX GEFORCE4	$209
Monitor	VIEWSONIC 19" G90f	$250
Hard Drives	SEAGATE 80.0GB ST380021A	2 x $99
CD-RW	AOPEN 48X-RC/12X-RW/50X-RD	$49
DVD	PIONEER DVD-119	$33
Case	ANTEC PLUS1080AMG	$145
Speakers	ALTEC LANSING 2100	$68
Key Board	MS NATURAL	$29
Floppy	TEAC	$10

Preexisting parts added to the machine:

HP DeskJet
ViewsSonic PS790

Later parts added to the machine:

1 GB DDR 2700 Kingston
Uniterable Power Supply, APC
Pioneer DVD R/RW
120 GB Seagate SATA hard drive

Places I shop:

www.mwave.com
www.newegg.com

Useful sites for reviews:

arstechnica.com
tomshardware.com

Short list of some software:

Linux /Fedora - free, comes with a lot
Web Browser: Firefox - free
Email Client: Thunderbird - free
Internet Radio: RealPlayer - free
Media Viewer - www.winamp.com
IDE: Elicpse - free
Open Office suite - free at www.openoffice.org
Window XP - free from from department
Anti virus scanner: AVIRA - free at www.avira.com
IDE: Visual Studio 2005 - free from department
FTP Client: FileZilla - Free at http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla
FTP Client: SmartFTP - Free for academic use
Telnet Client: PuTTY - free at www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Text editor: EditPlus - $30 at www.editplus.com
MS Office suite - $100
Marco Media suite - $200
Corel Draw - very old at $100
Zip for Windows: WinZip - looking for a better free product