Back To School

The school buses are being gassed up and the dorm rooms are being vacuumed. It must be back to school time. One of the questions that students ask themselves this time of year, is if their computer can stand the rigors of another academic year? The approach of the beginning of another academic year is a good excuse to evaluate the worthiness of your computer to sit in the Smithsonian.
If you find collectors from the museum knocking on your door to retrieve the national treasure that you once used to write papers and emails, here are some options to ensure that you aren’t left empty handed. The first thing that you need to do is to evaluate the usefulness of your computer based on what you anticipate the upcoming year to bring. There are three situations when I think that buying a new computer may be the best route for a student. If your student is moving from middle school to high school and the current computer has been in use longer than five years. I recommend this because students have a slightly heavier schoolwork load over the course of high school than they may have seen in middle school. The second situation is if your student is entering college. The course work in college exceeds that of high school curriculums exponentially. Students will be required to produce more material from multiple disciplines, and although they could become a library computer regular, purchasing a new system would probably save a lot of late night walks home from the library.
The final situation where I encourage the purchasing of new computer is if your student doesn’t currently have a computer or if it was purchased after 1998. It would be beneficial in the end to invest in a computer that should last you beyond the next half decade than to try to patch work a computer that may ultimately be more of a liability than an asset. When you are looking at purchasing a new computer, here are some minimums that you want to ensure that are present. Most new computers motherboards offer up to 2 gigabyte memory upgrade. The more memory that you have the faster that your computer can operate. Ideally, you want a system with 1 GB of memory, but no less than 512MB. In the age of the over 100GB hard drives, you should look for a computer with no less than 80 GB. For good computer speed for the next few years, you should look at computers with processors between 3.3-3.5 GHZ. A DVD drive that can write and rewrite both DVDs and CDs is necessary. DVDs can save four times the information of the CD. Most new computers include Ethernet cards, USB2 and Firewire ports, but having an installed flash card reader will be useful. Lastly, a biometric finger id scanner will help to safeguard your students’ computer and passwords. Next week, we will look at getting your existing computer ready for another year.