Recommendation for a 'university' laptop

A surface tablet/laptop, and onenote. OneNote is made of lectures and meeting settings.

Mush easier to to scribble your notes Down and snap pictures of the white boards etc using a pen and one note. Especially if they can’t type fast.

One note is also great for note management. Simple set up a workbook for each subject, and open a new page for each lecture in that subject. Since my x200t died I’ve missed using onenote. It just isn’t the same with out a pen.

The latest surface pro I think is upto 4, but if your friend just wants it for office related work and browsing, I’d say say a few shackles and get the previous gen.

If your friend doesn’t get on great with the surface flip cover keyboard, she could have an external one set up for long session home use. You can link to them via USB or Bluetooth.

I had a thinkpad so there was no trade off, but I’d take the trade off on the ms keyboard for the pen functionality.

+1 to the Lenovo in Dave’s link. My completely tech-unsavvy missus has the B50 and loves it. Bonus is that it’s so easy to maintain in good safe nick, which is good for the house IT section (Me) SWMBO does a lot of family history and it has helped her do that much easier than the old HP did.

Later in the year I will be parting with my desktop and buying a lappy: that will be a Lenovo. They are IMO as well made or better than the equivalent HP and usually cheaper.

Ed P wrote:

The only downside to the B50-10 is storage 128GB does not leave a lot of room for video recording lectures. How about going for a second hand Ideapad?

It has a SD slot, cards are cheap now, even 128 GB ones. Only reason I haven’t bought any is mine are mostly used in my helmet cam, it’s limited to 32GB.

I have a new Lenovo V110 with a 128GB SSD. I have heaps of crap brought over from the T420 on there including a VM or two and numerous ISOs etc.

There is 44GB free. Just looked at the saved video folder on the server and my collection of the 52 Red Dwarf and 32 Thunderbirds episodes would fit in there with 20GB to spare.

I don’t think storage is going to be an issue.

Just thinking that food technology now probably involves a whole lot of new techniques that may not make good notebook candidates. e.g. vacuum packing, waterbath cooking, use of liquid nitrogen, nitrous oxide etc.

I still think something you can draw on is best. Maybe simply pen and paper. And a ms net book or chrome book to write up essays.

You can use office on a CB. But I’d use gdocs, I prefer it to Word anyway.

Bob Williams wrote:

“Food Technology” reminds me of a very (in)famous Lincolnshire female with a Food Tech degree, who invented soft ice cream, as in Mr Whippy and Mr Softee. None other than Maggie Thatcher, who invented the way to efficiently insert air into the ice cream mix, thus enabling those two companies and others, to make more profit out of less material. And I think it is correct to say that she patented it, which may answer several questions about the Iron Lady.

Fake news, I’m afraid. She did no such thing.

How will they be recording these lectures / practical sessions?

BTW there were no videos made of chemistry practicals. Largely because the students were doing the practicals that being the point of a practical.

If you look at a typical prospectus, say this one from Nottingham Trent:

This course will build upon and develop the skills and knowledge that you will require for management roles in the food and drink sector. The course is delivered on a one day a week basis and for some of the rest of the week you will be expected to work within the food industry and undertake independent studies, including working on your coursework. This final year top-up course has been designed to provide you with a progression route from the foundation degree in Food Science and Technology. This course will give you the opportunity to work with your industry peers. You will gain an understanding and knowledge from other food businesses by sharing your work and study experiences together. It is accredited by the Institute of Food Science and Technology. You will enhance your skills and knowledge, helping to equip you for a management role in the food sector. Successful completion of the BSc (Hons) Food Science and Technology top-up degree will assist your career progression to management levels in an industry that has a real need for food science and technology graduates.

It’s only 1 day a week, the key seems to me to be “you will be expected to work within the food industry”. That’s where you see the practical end of the business, not the classroom. That’s all about theory.

I think you’re over thinking this Ed.

I give up. Clearly my children have gone through University woefully under equipped, as have their peers.

But let’s go back to the last line of the original post  “budget will be tight as ever”. A  Microsoft Surface Pro 4 – 1TB / Intel Core i7 for £1869 http://tinyurl.com/y8ywl4k9 just isn’t going to happen.

Here’s a list of laptops under £300 at saveonlaptops http://tinyurl.com/ydypssck

I was just looking at what they do at Bath.

“The University has a lecture capture service called Re:View. Content that has been recorded using this system can be viewed at the website xxx (you need to log in). Lecture capture technology allows the simultaneous recording of audio, video, powerpoint and screen capture, and allows that content to be viewed on the web, and mobile devices. Any lectures related to a Moodle course can be automatically added to the module and the presentations are restricted to the students registered to it.”

It’s quite an involved process http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/services/audiovisual/lecturecapture/ and there are copyright issues. It seems both in the copyright of something you may include (text from books?) and especially if it’s for public consumption. I guess Bath Uni themselves may have some sort of copyright over the whole thing too?

But the point is the student is the consumer of an online resource and that doesn’t need an expensive bit of kit.