6 Tips to Avoid Buying a Piece of Junk

Need a laptop? You don’t have to essentially sacrifice quality to get a good one. However, it’s very significant to take extra time to make sure that you’re not wasting your money, because there is a lot of scrap out there. This list will come in useful while you shop to make sure the budget laptop you’re looking at isn’t wounding corners on something you may need down the road. Here are six tips to get the best one.

1. Get enough memory

You should wait that any laptop you’re considering has 4GB of RAM. You may purchase a laptop with low memory and buy an extra stick of RAM to add-on — just make sure the laptop has a free slot before planning on this.

2. Spend in a decent processor

Microsoft Office and other basic applications suggest at least a 2.0GHz processor or better, which is found on most cheap laptops. Usually these will either be an Intel Atom or Celeron processor, though. While these processors are good enough for basic applications, they’ll likely swamp down under heavy use.

3. Get sufficient storage space

Manufacturers stint out on hard drive space when it comes to cheap laptops, unfortunately. It’s easy these days for you to have 10 gigabytes (even more) of photos and videos.

4. Keep away from laptops with bloat ware

Why these machines have so much valueless software? It’s simple: These companies are attractive much paying the producer, and in turn that maker can sell a cheap laptop. When shopping, look what applications are installed from the factory, and choose for machines that have fewer bloat wares.

5. Don’t drop for gimmicks

At times manufacturers will bend on gimmicks to distinguish themselves from the opposition — and believe us, there’s a lot of cheap computers out there. The best thing to do is keep away from fancy features.

6. Most prominently, try before you buy!

In the plan laptop space, perhaps the most significant thing you can do is in fact take them on a test drive. Going to a main electronics seller and comparing laptops side by side will rapidly give you an idea of the top applicants and the also-rans.

Why Using a Typewriter When You Have a Computer?

Why is a little, highly ranked housing university like Rice schools that pride itself on a small student/sense ratio and that has the happiest students prod deep in developing MOOCS?

This is the question that I unavoidably get asked the minute I mention Rice’s partnerships with Courser and Ex. And it’s a reasonable question, for at first look the MOOC world, with its worldwide delivery, open enrollment, and high abrasion rates seems to be at theatrical odds with the highly selective housing four-year learning ecosystem that schools like Rice deliver to the small amount students who are conventional each year. And yet, of course, it isn’t that simple. How we teach is as important as what we teach, and it is for this cause that Rice faculty has, from the start, had a big hunger for experimenting with the new education capabilities provided by platforms like Ex. and Courser.

Just as used computers and the internet unexpectedly created a whole range of communication opportunities that made the typewriter largely outdated, Rice faculty want to know if and how digital delivery might make the classroom chalkboard, the slide projector, and the power-point presentation a thing of the past addition or at times replaced by tools that enrich our matriculated students’ learning knowledge and make face-to-face classroom time even more modified and interactive than it is now.

In fact, faculty interest in testing was a real reason in the university’s decision to partner with not one but two platforms. And it is the option for radical innovation and learning about learning in the process that continues to imprison the imaginations of our best faculty from a range of disciplines including chemistry, earth science, computer science, electrical engineering, religious studies, and philosophy.

To help this new process along, our faculty council developed guidance and best practices that have played a critical role in decision-making about how we develop our digital education attendance more generally. Our students have been as paying attention as our faculty is helping to shape the look and feel of learning on our site in light of new digital delivery tools and not just by signing up for courses that are testing out flipped or blended formats. Rice students have been lively collaborators and team members, working straight with faculty to develop course material for both platforms. In fact, our platform partnerships have created an essential new opportunity for students to work together directly with faculty the possibility for just the kind of focused research that many of our students and their parents prize and that distinguishes a Rice education.

Recognizing that their classroom knowledge has the potential to be transformed by new teaching techniques and tools, the student friendship has convened a working group to understand better students’ hopes and ambitions for their thinker experience while at Rice. Their goal is to help shape the academic knowledge of those who follow them to be contributors to the transformation in teaching and in the learning about teaching now underway on our campus. Like many of its peers, Rice is interested in developing MOOCS to get better the quality of education that we deliver to our students.

But inquisitiveness and a thirst for new knowledge the very things that motivate people to learn in the first place are behind this interest. Creating surroundings where a robust spirit of inquiry and intellectual risk taking thrives is core to Rice’s mission. And so, at the most basic level, we are experimenting with digital delivery and online platforms to make sure that our campus is a place where assumptions are challenged not in actively accepted, where lively questioning of the world occurs, and where new forms of knowledge and testing thrive.