EARTH SCIENCES

There are a wide range of laptops available to purchase. We provide some advice to help you choose among them so that you can use them productively for work towards your degree in our programmes here at Bristol. In order of most to least important, these are the list of factors to consider.

Wireless networking

In the campus precinct, the only way you will be able to take advantage of the University's computer network from your laptop is by wireless access. You need to be able to connect using an 802.11g card (Apple Airport Extreme) or better (combined 802.11a/b/g or 802.11a/b/g/n) to allow access security protocols to work.

Web browsing

Virtually all educational schedules and materials are delivered over the web.

PDF reading

Virtually all technical documents that you will read (scholarly articles, lecture handouts, etc.) will be delivered as portable document format (PDF) documents. Your computer should be able to read these easily.

Document sharing

Next to transmitting copies of documents to a correspondent over the network through a file server or by e-mail, passing it by USB memory stick is the second most common way. Your laptop should have a USB connection on it.

Text processing

There are virtually no limitations on choice here. The department does not provide any templates (like for report writing, homework assignments, etc) for any particular text processing package (TeX, Word, Open Office, Pages, troff). However, you will need to write documents that require equations to be written (e.g. ) and units to be attached to numbers (e.g. density in kg m^-3), so this feature should be present and easy to use.

CPU, Memory and File storage

CPU and memory should be adequate to run the software you will need to use; see the list below. What software you choose to place on your own computer also affects disk space. As part of your university networking package, you will have have access to a private, university-provided file store. This, and the cheap availability of >100 Gb laptop disks suggest that storage on your own computer is not an important consideration.

Software

Your laptop should be able to run these packages that you will ultimately use in your coursework (for assignments or writing up reports). Some are commercially available, but free equivalents are listed for each. The commercial packages are available for use on the 12 computers in G32. The benefit of using free equivalents is that you can use them outside the University without restriction.

Manufacturer

Earth Sciences has traditionally used Apple Macs, and there is extensive support knowledge within it for those machines and systems. The wider University is generally PC oriented, but with perhaps a half-dozen departmental exceptions. In the 2010/11 academic year the University is hosting a laptop clinic where they can give walk-in advice on troubleshooting configuration problems for systems by any manufacturer. It is quite popular and continues to run from its start in 2008.

If you think you might want to carry your laptop into the University on a daily basis, size and weight are considerations.

The University has negotiated discounted purchase agreements with a limited number of providers that include Toshiba (via GETech) and Apple (via Apple HE) laptops.