Laptop - Must have

[honkycat1]

Ok so I'm not a HUGE fan of laptops as the performance can't be compared with PCs and they are a bit clunky and more expensive.

I'm considering the following options:

1) 2 desktops, 1 at home, 1 at office in school

2) 1 desktop, 1 tablet (ipad or some sort for carrying)

3) 1 desktop, 1 laptop.

so I'm just curious, how ESSENTIAL, is having a laptop as a graduate student in psychology. I understand there will be a lot of reading and notetaking in class, but I feel a lot of that can be done in a tablet then transfered to a desktop or whatever later on. there are things a tablet can't do like run SPSS or SAS or whatever so I guess if we have to do that IN CLASS, then I'm SOL but again, the alternative is have 2 desktops.

I'm not worried about transfering stuff as USBs are more than sufficient.

anyways, just curious if anyone here went through graduate school without a laptop or know people that doesn't have a laptop and have a similar setup as my 1) or 2).

or is there no way of going through graduate school w/out a laptop.

ttyvm

[Alyanumbers]

Well, my desktop is currently dead, but I strongly believe in option 3 and intend to implement it in grad school. My laptop is a netbook, btw, which means I can carry it around with me everywhere. The idea is to have memory-hogging applications installed on your desktop, and save the netbook for websurfing/notetaking on the go.

[Eigen]

I have a desktop at work (my office), a laptop and an iPad.

Since I got the iPad 3 months ago, I have yet to boot up my laptop to actually use it... Just once a month to do updates on the antivirus, etc.

I used to have a desktop at home as well, but it died last December, and I just haven't found it worth replacing yet.

If I want to get heavy work done, I come in to my office- otherwise, my iPad does most of the light browsing/entertainment I need at home. It also provides a nice compartmentalization.

With any of the setups, I highly recommend DropBox. It lets you keep your stuff easily synced between several computers/devices. It means I have access to any file on my desktop from my iPad/laptop anywhere I have an internet connection, but it also automatically syncs and downloads any changes when it's connected, which are then stored on the device and viewable offline. You can also access it via a web interface on any computer (giving a presentation, using a friends), and it's compatible between operating systems.

If you want to try it out, use my referral code (http://db.tt/99d4I7o), it's an education account, so you get an extra 500 mbs free if you start from said referral, leaving you with a free 3 gb of online storage to use for backup/file sharing between your computers.

Edited May 4, 2011 by Eigen

[lewin]

I have a desktop in my office and a laptop at home. At work, I like the large screen and that I don't have to lug my laptop to school each day. Also, my supervisor said he'd buy me an office desktop but not a laptop, so that decision was made for me.

Otherwise, I've never--not once--used my laptop to take notes in class, but it's handy for taking to conferences, doing presentations, and working in coffee shops. For home use, I would never go back to a desktop and lose the flexibility of working anywhere (or watching TV in bed, etc). Unless you're doing something that requires crazy amounts of computing power a laptop is fine. I use SPSS, AMOS, word, excel, etc. on my Intel Core 2 duo 2.0 GHz with 4 GB ram just fine, purchased in 2007.

Edit: I second the recommendation of dropbox.

Edited May 4, 2011 by lewin00

[repatriate]

I use a laptop for classes, primarily because printing all of the reading for a week (most are journal articles distributed as PDFs) gets very expensive, and with good PDF reading/organizing software, referencing specific quotations, figures, or personal notes is just as easy as with a printout. I get a print account, but I would exhaust it within a few weeks if using it to print class materials.

I have a labmate who shares his laptop with his wife and does most of his at-school work in the computer labs or in our lab (when no participants are being run). This works well enough for him.

Whether or not you will be provided with a work computer probably depends on the grant money of your advisor. You could ask them or their students whether the lab or the department provides a computer for students.

[LJK]

I don't take notes in my psych grad classes - most of them are set up to do some reading on some topic then have a discussion delving deeper into the science than we probably did reading on our own. They tend to be about training us to approach the literature in an appropriate way - so we can reach that deeper understanding without the scaffolding of having 5-10 other people also reading the same things. There is also a component of being exposed to the literature, but all of these types of classes have had papers rather than some sort of comprehensive exam - so to my mind, no reason to take notes that are more than comments in the margins of my print outs. I don't like reading long articles on my computer.

The only exception to this is stats. I had a paper and pen notebook for stats. At the same time, stats at my school was more application based than mathematically based - it took TAing stats for me to really understand the underpinnings of the analyses. We were learning when to apply different tests and when the assumptions of a test had been violated - the sorts of things that are in the textbook.

So for me, a laptop is not necessary for class. I would look at your research interests when thinking about this. Is there any possibility that you will need to go into the field with your computer? If you do developmental work, there may come a time when you go to them rather than having them come to you. I second lewin00's comment on conferences - if your presentation isn't 100% done before you leave for a conference, a laptop is very helpful!

Laptops are useful, but you will probably be able to get by without one if that is your preference.