Just want to put in a good word for taking notes by hand - I did it all the way through my undergrad, even though sometimes I was seemingly the only person in an entire lecture theatre doing it.
I found, because of the relative slowness, I was much more selective with what I noted, and had to really listen to what was being said, so I ended up with only the important bits. Whereas some of my friends sat there basically doing a dictation of the lecture without actually listening to it, and then had pages and pages of notes full of waffle which they had to keep re-reading to find the key info. If you then copy the notes onto a laptop later, as I did, then you will effectively be digesting the content twice, which'll make both recall and exam revision much easier.
Maybe you'll need a laptop anyway so you can have articles or resources open and follow along with the lecturer (depends on what course you're doing), but just in terms of note-taking I would consider at least trialling doing it by hand.