physics course laptop

fingers crossed im heading to oxford to study physics come october

can anyone think of any special hardware or software requirements the physics course may put on my laptop

i quite like the look of the HP pavilion DV6820, would this suffice?

i also would like it to use it for music production but its not essential

but i dont want to break the bank

Reply 1

theiloth

Have you looked into an HP t2500z, it's relatively cheap and the cpu is good enough to handle music software and stuff. The best part is that it is a newer tablet pc with a good touch screen which I'd think would be very useful in notetaking and other activities.

There's a review of the tablet here

Edit: I looked at the HP pavilion DV6820, it's similarly spec'd to the tablet, so long as you're not into playing the latest and greated pc games both should be more than powerful enough to run work software.

Reply 2

Spanky Deluxe

1

To be honest, you'll have very little use for your laptop on a Physics course. The only thing that you might use is programming languages if you do computational modules, in which case it'll likely be Matlab, IDL, C or Fortran - all of which are available for Mac, Windows an *nix. Music production's simpler to do on a Mac though - Garageband is a great starter program and it comes with all new macs and then there, of course, the high end music production apps from Apple. On the Windows side I always liked Fruity Loops. You can get 14% off and 3 years warranty on all new macs if you call them up and tell them you're eligible for the Higher Educational discount.

I think in all my time during my undergraduate degree and during my postgraduate masters I only ever saw one person using a laptop in lectures (a tablet). Unfortunately Physics is very hard to type - way too many equations. It becomes more stress than its worth and you'd be fiddling with Microsoft Equation editor / Latex far too long to get anything down.
If you want a digital copy of all your notes, I'd suggest getting a cheap scanner too and scanning in your notes to multi-page pdf files after each lecture.

Reply 3

theiloth

Well, I think it's time that people in the UK used laptops more in lectures etc, here in the US it's encouraged to productive outcomes.

Tablets/laptops save so much time copying down notes and greatly help with organization (OneNote 2007 is highly recommended in this regard.) Also a tablet pc solves the issue of copying down equations/diagrams since you're writing on the screen, newer tablet technology makes this feel very much like writing using a pen/

Reply 4

strangesquark

10

Henry Carter

i quite like the look of the HP pavilion DV6820, would this suffice?

I went to Comets the other day and I also quite liked that laptop, not too big/small for me, just hoping my parents will cough up now lol.

But for some reason my uni says they recommend a Mac, but I'm not really sure the difference. Can someone please explain why a Mac would be better?

Reply 5

Spanky Deluxe

1

Probably because a mac has a unix core. Unix is what universities have been using for decades and a lot of custom scientific apps are only for 'nix. This stuff can be easily recompiled to run on OS X but not on Windows. Seriously, I think there are two members of staff / post docs out of about thirty in my department who use Windows, everyone else uses OS X. During my course, out of the three other guys who share my office with me two of them have bought macs since starting (one needed a laptop anyway and the other wanted a machine he could do his work on) and the other guy wishes he'd bought a mac instead of the HP laptop he bought before the course started. I'm not trying to be an Apple fanboy here before anyone flames me, I'm just saying what its like in my department.

Having said that, I was a Windows user for the first 2 years of my Physics undergrad course and it never did me any harm - you use your computer so little for your course, it really doesn't matter. While tablet pcs are nice, I don't think you could comfortably scribble down some of the long equations that you get in some Physics lectures.

Reply 6

theiloth

Macs use Intel these days, they made the switch 1-2 years ago so you'd need a much older mac to get a Unix core.

Reply 7

CallumFR

9

theiloth

Macs use Intel these days, they made the switch 1-2 years ago so you'd need a much older mac to get a Unix core.

As far as I'm aware, the fact that Macs use Intel processors now doesn't change the fact that the OS generally used on Macs is Unix-based at its core.

Reply 8

theiloth

that be true! But it does mean with some work OSX can run on any newer intel based laptop.

Reply 9

Spanky Deluxe

1

That's true - but its unsupported and is a right hassle. You have to shop *very* carefully for each component in a PC that you'd want to hack OS X onto and it becomes even more tricky to get everything working on a laptop. If you want OS X, you'd be better off buying a Mac and then dual booting it with Windows if you need that too.

physics course laptop

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