Notebook buying hoops

Note: this is more of a "how to equip a mature student/equipment review" entry than a personal one. I understand some of you are considering returning to school, so hopefully this helps.

My medical leave of absence ended and I resumed my studies a few weeks ago. I quickly found that my dear lovely iMac wasn't really adequate. Don't get me wrong - she's a lovely machine and I can't complain. It's the environment that's killing me. My desk is cramped and the ergonomics are bad. My primary defence has been fidgeting - I'll get up and do something else every half hour or so. That works for programming but it doesn't when I'm studying. If I'm tracing complex math, interruptions are devastating. It also doesn't help that the kids' play area is in the next room. I tried it out for a week or so and I started pulling my hair out within days. Once, one of the kids kept singing a song over and over again in the next room and it stuck in my head. I couldn't get it out for hours and it totally killed my productivity. So after much soul and bank account searching, I bought a MacBook after getting the greenlight from my sis.

I am much more productive in my studies now - I can pick up and go somewhere quieter if needed and if I have a spare lunch hour, I can do my work right there and then. However, the MacBook's pretty fragile (don't believe what Apple says) so I ended up getting a bunch of accessories to protect it plus more memory for the heavy-duty processing. There were two add-ons in particular that caused me quite a bit of anguish.

I have an old copy of Microsoft Office:Mac 2004 from my old iBook days. It did what it was supposed to do, sometimes with all the elegance of a falling anvil. Unfortunately, it looks horrible on the screen. I put up with it previously but now after my eye surgery in January, I have a hard time looking at it even on my 20" screen, much less on my MacBook's. I ran the trial for iWork '08 and the Pages word processor absolutely looks beautiful! Everything's nice and crisp, with Apple's usual intuitiveness. However, there was a deal-killer: it didn't have any equation editing capabilities like MS Word does and I do quite a bit of math for my papers. I was leery about using a separate package to do equations - why use two applications when MS Word has it all? But I did my due diligence and tried out a few, which is how I found LaTeX Equation Editor. I don't know LaTeX but it was very intuitive to use and it gave me a lot more control and speed than the one built into MS Word. Plus, it's free. So it came back down to whether using Pages in iWork made any difference in work time. So I tested them both out. On MS Word, I could work for about 10 minutes before my eyes started watering. Rest breaks don't help - 10 minutes is too short an interval to do anything useful. Switching to my Dell laptop running Office XP didn't help significantly unless I used a large monitor too, which kills the portability requirement. With Pages, I could go 30 minutes before getting tired. Wow, what a difference! I discussed it with my family and my sis (bless her heart!) said clearly, "Take care of your eyes. That is most important. Anything that reduces the strain on them is worth it." So I plonked down $80 and got iWork. I had moments of buyer's regret during the first couple of days but now that I've had it for nearly a week, I must say that it was a good buy - it's soooooo much more comfortable to work with.

The other thing that caused me pain was my carrying load. You see, I carry at least two handbags (a medium and a large) and usually, that's sufficient. However, having a notebook around changes the equation completely. To cut a long story short, I spent nearly three weeks trying on different combinations of the bags we own to carry everything I needed as comfortably as possible without looking horrible. Unfortunately, the "best" combination was a two-bag system that I could carry for only 15 minutes or so before it got tiring. That wasn't an acceptable combo - I spend about 30-45 minutes collecting books from the library shelves before settling in every paper session. So I started a hunt for a one-bag solution and after a couple of false tries, I found the Tracer Neo Micro. I'm now down to just one bag that I could carry for up to an hour - I know because I tested it today while herding the kids around the Science Centre for most of the afternoon. Small piece of trivia: I was lugging about a sixth of my body weight prior to the Tracer Neo if laden with a notebook. A sixth doesn't seem like much...until you realize that it's 20-40 lbs for most of us and I carry that load for sustained periods of time daily.

I had been using MATLAB but my older version is glitchy on Intel Macs. An upgrade is $99 and there's serious licensing restrictions that I really don't like. So I sprang for SciLab instead. Takes a bit of getting used to but it looks like a very good package. The Widgets for arxiv.org and NASA ADS have become mainstays. I use Time Out for eyesight rest breaks when I'm not doing math.

I *hope* this setup will last me at least 3-5 years. Macs have endurance when it comes to the software requirements upgrade game - I know many owners of old 800MHz iBooks who can still find software for their needs with minimal fuss. It's only the physical breakdowns that creep me out. My iBook died one month past warranty and I didn't have AppleCare then. :( My iMac died 4 months in and this time, I did have AppleCare - 3 weeks later it was back, good as new. Contrast that with my Dell Inspiron 5100 - 7 years old and still alive and well except for its DVD drive. So why a Mac? Simple - for the same price as a Windows notebook, I can dual-boot Mac OS X and Windows. Best of both worlds. I hate to say it, but AppleCare is just the cost of doing business with Apple - their quality control isn't up to what I'd expect.

Totaling up the bill was scary. The scarier part is that while I'm neither cheapening nor maxing out on my purchase, an equivalent system from Dell runs around the same price anyway and it's heavier and much slower for what I need it to do. Working it into the budget took a bit of work but we did it. My heartfelt thanks to my dear sis who trusted me to make the right choices.

Is a notebook/laptop really needed for studies? I think it all depends on who you are and what you're studying. If you're in high school, probably not - the family desktop should suit you just fine. If you're an older student doing papers, it depends on your home environment and your subject of study. In my case, it has turned out to be a resounding yes - I need to be able to take my work somewhere quiet to swot and I need a computer with a decent processor to sort out my calculations - if I can't analyze and manipulate huge gobs of data, I'm dead in the water. I'm looking forward to the day when apps take full advantage of multi-core processors.

Regardless, it's all horrifying expensive. Sometimes I wonder if my studies are worth it. :(