Computers for College Students: A Primer For Parents Part 1

Let me take a break on my audio system series and discuss something else while it's on my mind. The college student computer, since I'm working on this for a client.

Before this even happens, there's a lot to be done in the summer before your kid leaves. There's a ridiculous amount of stuff to buy ranging from the almost insignificant to the really important. In today's world, one of the most important is their computing device(s).

When they think of college, one of the first things that flashes into a parent's mind is this...... a tiny space where two people have to live, keep all their stuff and co-exist..... not necessarily in that order. I know, they may not all be this tight, but this is certainly not the smallest! Believe me, I know! In a former life, I've worked as a residence hall director/coordinator for some few years. I'm all too familiar with these rooms. I'm not even going to reference my days as a college student at Texas A&M University, because we didn't bring electronics (I was in the Corps of Cadets), and personal (versus PCs) computers for students pretty much didn't exist in 1980.

So, the next thing that jumps into a parent's mind is this..... How is he/she going to get all that stuff into his/her room, so the natural inclination is to go with......

..... and that'd be a mistake..... for the following reason(s). Not all students are alike and not all computers have the same capabilities. If your kid is an English/Psychology/Education/Nursing/Family Studies (the list goes on), then you're good. You can stop reading right here, and buy whatever the school is recommending (with one caveat) and mark that item off your list. There is one other little thing, but I'll address it later. However, if your pride and joy is aspiring to be an Engineering/Graphics Design/Animation (anything that's computing intensive), things get complicated. 

This is what I'm recommending (in general), with a few modifications. Why, two computers for "Pete's Sake"!?!

Do you remember that old "college feel" that you were so impress with when you visited? The ivy covered walls, the quaint, late-1800s/early-1900s buildings, or even those big modern looking buildings that held the huge lecture halls that look like this? Go ahead, tell me what you see? Remember, falling asleep in the back of those like I did and knocking your spiral notebook onto the floor making everybody look at you? Imagine that spiral being a $1000 laptop notebook the size of a small briefcase. I'm sure you can image that off of those little tiny fold-up lap-desks right? Then imagine your kid throwing his (it's always the male isn't it) computer into his bag, then throwing that same bag down.... how many times over the course of just one week? The bigger/heavier the computer, the more mass and the great the impact. That's just one factor. 

OK, now imagine your kid schlepping that same computer across this campus from class-to-class every day. You remember, the same one that you struggled to walk across when you guys visited?

Then imagine the laptop in his/her bag being one like this (the Dell Precision M8400 which was one of the top 5 best engineering laptops of it's year), roughly 8 pounds without the giant 1-2 pound power adapter, but that they'd have to carry because the "real world" battery life will be between 1 and 2 hours....... "silence" as the commercial says. Yup. Oh, but they could leave that one in their room and use their phone like they do all the time now, right!?! OK. Chew on this. On a regular basis today, profs will refer to documents that they've prepared and that students must reference (often in class), or a website, or last week's notes on a  PowerPoint that he/she's not putting up because they have today's up there on the projector that you're already struggling to see because you're sitting 120 feet away in that giant lecture hall. So yeah, suffice to say that they need to be carrying a device that they can use all the time to access data at will. 

 

 

In today's world, the there are three candidates for this job. A "convertible" computer such as Microsoft's Surface/Pro, basically a full UltraBook PC in a tablet form that the user can easily attach a keyboard for productivity use. The tablet, in iOS, Android or MS Windows that can do similar stuff, not quite as capable, but can be cheaper/lighter and in an amazing variety of sizes, prices and forms. And the "Clamshell" "Ultra-portable" (at or sub-3lbs) full laptop. These are typically around 12" screens making them OK to carry and use in the classroom. So, that's one computing device. The other?

That's a desktop PC? Yup. This one is the Cooler Master Elite 130 case, less than $50 to buy, about the size of the proverbial breadbox. Don't like the style, buy any number of those ones between $50 and $100, a Mini-ITX motherboard, other parts, build (or have somebody else build) a machine that's going to cost around $600. Spend another $400 to $600 on the other device, and you're done! There is one more option if you have $3000+!

This is an Asus, but Razer started it a year of so ago. What is it? It's an UltraBook, with built-in graphics (read, not good for heavy duty use), but connects to an external enclosure that houses a full-sized graphics card of your choice and therefore giving the notebook PC the muscle to do pretty much anything. Plan on spending around $4000 total to get yourself going. My plan proposes spending $1000. That's the price of a pretty nice laptop computer at Best Buy. There'll be more parts to this concept to come.

Office Monsters!

 

No, I don't mean that weird guy in the cubicle down the corridor; I mean Giant Monster "Laptops". If you're not acquainted with names such as AVA Direct, Eurocom, Falcon Northwest, and other builders of custom "gaming" notebooks, then this will be something new for you. Remember this name: Clevo. That's it.....just Clevo. This company pretty much is the driving force behind all the various esoteric gaming laptop computer companies all these years, and even the almighty Alienware before that kill-joy Dell swooped in and bought them out.

For years, this little know Taiwanese company has been stuffing essentially desktop hardware into what could loosely be called laptop computers. I say that because the result has generally been north of 10 pounds and with the giant power bricks (literally the size and weight of a real brick), they often push the 15 pound barrier. 

Some of you might remember my little ill-fated foray into the gaming computer world for my son that resulted in the selling off of the modified Clevo, and Alienware parts machines. Although I got my money back out of them, but didn't accomplish what I set out to do, and I still have a bit of a fixation on these giants. In the time from when I was dabbling with these oddities, till the present, things have gone just a wee bit crazy.

 

That's three hard drives depicted in the D900f in the upper picture and that's FOUR fans in the chassis of the new X7200 in the lower picture! That's one for the CPU, one for the chipset and one each for the two GPUs. It's ridiculous, but you gotta love 'em for their shear audacity! 

Meanwhile, as all this was coming to pass on the "portable" gaming front, the "Big Boys" tried to take big mainstream. Dell was first "out the gate" with the Inspiron XPS M2010 ... which, with it's 20" screen was so big; it was it's own case.....complete with handle. 

Of course, HP simply can't allow Dell to do much of anything that it didn't have an answer for; so behold the Hewlett/Packard HDX "Dragon"....with a deck so big they put a well for a remote in it! 

Now, conceptually, the idea was for these things to be "media" PCs with every A/V bell and whistle under the sun. Never mind that nobody wanted to sit in front of a 20" LCD, vs. attaching a media PC to a really big (40" plus) monitor for their A/V enjoyment. Everybody needed to jump on the bandwagon! Here you see one of the Samsung behemouths complete with requisite attractive Korea model that probably couldn't even lift this thing! In the end, it was basically an interlude in the PC business and these things have pretty much gone away. 

So; what are we here to talk about after all that "rabbit chasing"? The real "monster" of course. Luckily, not the "River Monster" variety which is my wife's current TV show obsession! No, this one is pure ThinkPad. I can't imagine Lenovo being really wild about this concept, which is why it's been killed off fairly quickly after 2 models; W700, and W701. What you see here is the W700DS, standing for dual screen, obviously (more on that later).

 

Here's the deal on these oddities. Five years ago, in 2008, Lenovo released the first of the "W" line, W700, and W500 to act as replacements for the "p" (workstation) versions of the "T" line. The W5xx exists to this day, is pretty normal and therefore uninteresting. Also, it's not nearly big enough to qualify for the "monster" label anyway. Conceptually, the W7xx machines were supposed to do everything that a desktop machine would do, but have an attached monitor and be closed up and moved (sort of). 

 

One of it's more interesting ideas was to make it a photographer's mobile digital darkroom, complete with automated color calibration for the monitor and an optional built-in Wacom digitizer pad complete with an active pen tucked away in a silo in the side of the machine. 

To give you an idea of how large it actually is; that's an X300 (13.3" screen) it's next to in the upper image and an X61 (12.1" screen) sitting in it's "lap" in the lower image. Inside the giant chassis are 2 hard drive bays capable of taking and configuring two hard drives into a RAID set. 

It's so big, that even the "Mini-Dock" made for it is big! The CPUs in them can range from the fastest of the Core2Duo series to the Core i7 processors. The last of the models could take powerful nVidia Quattro GPUs and up to 16Gb of DDR3 RAM. The 17" screen can range from 1440 x 900 all the way up to 1920 x 1200, plus a 10.6" pullout screen of 1280 x 768 resolution. Fully equipped, it was upwards of 11 pounds and cost in excess of $5500! Surfice to say, I'd love to have one. Over the years I've tried a number of times to develop a powerful "mobile workstation", beginning with the T4x series, then Z61m, and now T6x machines. However, I've never been fully happy with the results and now that the lower end of the W700s have dropped into the sub-$500 range, they are starting to get my attention. 

 

Maybe, like the "River Monsters" guy, I can land one for myself someday. But then again, there's the really cool Asus G73.....