I'm not in college, but am in high school. My school's fairly competitive and could just as well b e college (we are on a college campus).
I used my laptop first just in Biology - each student sits at a G4 PowerMac and the teacher's very forward-thinking. It worked well. Diagrams (anatomy systems, life cycles) were a bit of a pain. This was on a Dell, mind you, but it shouldn't matter. I used an external mouse at sometimes, and wrote it out at others. I had to switch back to written notes at one point because my Dell was out of service for about two months, but that's another story.
I also began to use the notebook in History and English - worked well, teachers didn't seem to mind. Didn't use it much in English as we rarely take notes, and when we do the teacher gives us worksheets to do so. I also used the computer in my Intro to Engineering Design class, loading Autodesk Inventor on it. It worked well, the only issue being I had to put finished work on flash drive or go the the ethernet switch to print it. The school won't give out the Wifi key in that part of the building.
For Latin I used the notebook a lot. It helped me because like most people of high intelligence (just playing), I have ****** handwriting. When I'd be copying over the vocab lists, sometimes A's would turn into O's and vice-versa. Then come time for the quizzes and I'd loose points. So this way I was able to avoid that.
For math I never even tried to take notes on it. I just used the traditional pen and paper. Maybe next year I'll give it a try.
My main problem with my notebook is its size. It's a 15" display, but the notebook is about 2" thick, and it's pretty heavy. You won't have these problems more than likely. That's why I'm getting a 12" (or maybe 13" if they ever make one) PowerBook with a 20" display at home.
Also get a top loading bag. My current bag is the kind that you zip up around the edges, which makes it take a while for me to put it away in between classes. Sometimes you have a teacher that wants to lecture until class is over, and while we have no bell system, I still don't want to be late for the next class.
I've also given some thought to when I go to college - for the first year at least I'll just have the PB that I buy next summer and probably my Dell laptop for PC-specific stuff. The PB will only be about three years old and the PC just less than five. A year later or so I will probably buy a new PC laptop (unless we can run windows and the associated Engineering apps on x86 Macs) as my Engineering courses become more demanding. I was going to get a desktop, but I feel a laptop is more practical and easier to secure.
Wow this is long. Good luck!
Brian
) but then I started thinking that it might be tough. I'm majoring in Engineering, and with all the charts and diagrams they're bound to throw at me... taking notes on a computer seems like it might be a bit tougher than I thought. I type a lot faster than I write, but I just know those diagrams and crap will slow me down. Any thoughts?