What laptop does your child use for Uni

[iwantavuvezela]

DD is currently finishing A Levels, and hoping to go to Uni after that. Her laptop that was bought at the start of Covid has reached the end of its life and I want to upgrade it for her birthday.
went to curry's to have a look today at the options - she quite liked the Samsung Galaxy Book3.

she is going to study a stem subject. (if that is relevant)

Any advice from those with children at Uni on what they really needed?

At the moment looking for something lightweight(ish); decent battery; storage; and of course affordable!

I would have thought that Office would have been provided free by the uni.

My DS just has a Chromebook, and says it's fine

Don't bother with Dell - they are so glitchy I sped more time trying to get mine to work than I do actually using it!

I'd agree. We've had a few Dells over the years and none have been robust. Keys started dropping out of the keyboard of the last we had after just a few months. On a previous one, we had all kinds of issues with the internal hard drive, so ended up having it permanently plugged into an external hard drive.

In our experience, the best and most robust are the Samsung ones. Had several over the years and not a single problem with any of them. Still got some very old ones (10/15 years or so) that we still use for some rarely used programs and legacy data which acts as our archives.

I'd agree. We've had a few Dells over the years and none have been robust

My experience has been exactly the opposite. I am on my second Dell laptop since 2008 and I am just considering another because my current one won’t run Windows 11. They have been hammered too, being used for work and home.

I like dell laptops too - my own is that one. One of my sons took his apple lap top which is still going (albeit with regular trips to the apple store to fix it) which he had since before 2017. However interesting now in his first job he could have apple or windows as the work lap top and went for windows as as a lawyer most of his work is about documents, Word and that kind of thing not creative art type stuff.

My work laptop is a Dell.
My personal laptop is an Acer.

Both are excellent.

Quite frankly, I don't understand why people worship at the altar of Apple.

I have a 5 year old ASUS Vivobook and it has seen me through a PGDE and MA. Still going strong and honestly the best laptop I've ever had.
That model is no longer available but I really rate ASUS.

Dd is in her first year at uni and we bought her a MacBook

My son bought himself an Apple Mac laptop, using the Apple offer that's usually around Aug/Sept. It was quite good value, he got a discount plus a voucher that he used to buy a laptop sleeve, extra charger and a case for his iPhone.

Expensive purchase, but he's never regretted it.

Best to check with the uni they will be going before buying a laptop. My son girlfriend buy a macbook she end up buying a new one for her second year as the macbook did not have set up required.

If she's got an offer then she should check what's recommended for that specific course.
My DD did engineering, she needed a decent spec windows laptop. An apple or any tablet simply wouldn't have run the required software. One with inadequate memory/speed wouldn't have run some of it fast enough.

My advice as a recent mature student - look at the weight (including any power adaptor) and the battery life. It's a pain in the arse to have a laptop that won't last more than a couple of lectures and to be having to scrabble for a seat where you can plug into power, and it's a pain to be carting something with a huge heavy power adaptor (my gaming laptop is guilty of this) back and forth and around campus.

I ended up with a combination of an iPad (with the pencil) and MacBook for weight reasons alone - the iPad was brilliant for my course, which was Speech and Language Therapy when it came to elements like phonetics where typing all the special characters quickly was difficult - I'd swap to my iPad, handwrite that element and then pop it into my typed notes.

I am in STEM and have always been able to help students convert software for Macs if necessary. I myself was converted to Apple by DB, a computer scientist. He used it from the beginning, both personally and professionally.

I would wait to see where DD is going to be. To be prudent I would probably follow their recommendations. But I wouldn’t currently assume an anti-Apple bias

@iwantavuvezela my son is doing a STEM subject and his departmental prospectus had a minimum spec which was needed for the coding he would be doing. We also wanted one that would be small and light. We ended up with a Microsoft Surface Go 2.

My son is just finishing a degree in cybercrime he uses a HP laptop.
He's just started a job with a top cyber firm they also use HP.
I don't rate my Apple Mac as can't use word or pdf documents on it.

Trying to figure out how that's an issue cos I work with word and pdfs all the time on mine... the one I can't do and does annoy me sometimes slightly is Publisher.

I had DSA software provided for dyslexia and some of my stuff didn't fully work as well when I moved across to a MacBook - things like the lecture recording software (think it was Sonocent) which was fine recording a lecture from microphones, but couldn't record from watching a recorded lecture like the Windows version did - wouldn't normally have been an issue, but this was during the "pivot to remote learning" pandemic era so it was a mild pain in the arse to work around!

DD had DSA software and it was recommended that she got a Windows laptop because her Macbook wasn't compatible with the software. DSA subsidised the cost of her laptop as well. She has graduated now and got to keep the laptop, which she uses all the time.

Equally depending on the stem subject Apple can be hopeless - my daughter doing meng has a dell other daughter a mac.

Most of the stuff the Meng daughter doing doesn't work well on macs

lectures wise they both use ipads with pencils for notes etc

1 x Macbook
1x Surface Pro

Avoid Dell

My work laptop is a Dell and I don't have any problems with it.

I have a work issued Surface Pro and it’s fine until the summer when it overheats on warm days. I have occasionally had to take the drastic step of working in the cellar. Colleagues have had the same issue. My husband has a Dell and he doesn’t.

Why can't you use word or PDF documents on it?
I can on mine.

Commercial Dell's are completely different to the domestic ones. Your work almost certainly won't have bought it from Currys!