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You may be considering buying or upgrading your own PC/laptop for supporting your studies.
For the academic session starting September 2011, I am advised that a reasonable minimum specification for effective support of your studies would be:
and our computer officers have suggested that adding
more RAM, and then
increasing the CPU speed would be beneficial.
2.4GHz/2GB with 40Gb hard disk, a 17" monitor (with resolution
1280x1024)
should give a comfortable specification
for some of the more advanced (and "computer hungry") applications that
you may need during the course, where the minimum spec given above
would
not necessarily be satisfactory. This upgrade would probably also be
advisable as a minimum if
the computer were equipped with Windows 7, rather than one of the older
versions of Windows, say. In the last year a number of students have made effective use of Netbooks running Windows 7.
In each case you would probably need to start the year with a couple of Gbytes free on your hard disk to accommodate new application installations.
For multimedia work, your PC would also probably need at least a low-end 'gaming-capable' graphics interface (for example NVIDIA GeForce FX6200), and a 'SoundBlaster Live' or equivalent sound card.
To be directly comparable with the primary installations at the University, then your operating system should be Windows XP Pro or Windows 7. However, there is no reason why you should not use another operating system where it is compatible with the applications, and our computer officers will give as much help as they can with any reasonable choice of operating system. As yet, compatibility issues between specialist applications that we use and Windows Vista have not yet been explored.
Of course, you should also make sure that you are equipped with an effective back-up scheme, to protect yourself in the event of a hard disk failure (or operational mistake).
Note that the Department makes available a compendium of the software applications that are used during our courses. This is available on our Departmental file servers - you can find details here. You can download what you need via the University's network, burn your own copy of the software to a blank CD if you wish, or collect the elements you need to a USB flash drive.
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Last updated: Friday, 02-Sep-2011 09:55:47 BST
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