What should a student install on his laptop?
For note-taking in lectures I use Microsoft OneNote, which comes with some versions of Office. It’s like Word, but streamlined for note-taking, so you can draw diagrams easily and not worry about remembering to save stuff. Excel is good enough for most of the stats I need to do since I installed MegaStat, a plugin that came free with a stats book. I looked at OpenOffice, and liked its equation editor, which is much better than Microsoft’s, but I ended up using Microsoft Office instead. OpenOffice doesn’t always open or save Word docs with complex formatting properly, and it’s far slower to start up. The OpenOffice spreadsheet isn’t as powerful as Excel with MegaStat, either. I found lecturers and supervisors regularly sent me Word documents that didn’t work properly in OpenOffice. For sending essays or notes to other students or professors, I would use PDF because its reliable and ubiquitous.
Maybe not what you’re thinking of, but I highly recommend AV software BEFORE you get to school. There was a nasty virus (both connotative meanings of nasty. In this case, it was endless porn pop ups until your computer froze, and everyone had the problem) going around the network during move in week last year. And of course, the usual Spybot & Adaware. For a while, I had this program that let you put your calendar ask the wallpaper (as in: you could add events, etc to your actual desktop). It was pretty spiffy until 23532532 different kinds of web calendars with way more features came out.
As a recent student at a college where we were encouraged to bring a laptop to class: What you need is some games 🙂 Playing sorta mindless games (standard windows games or emulated retro games usually) put me in the right frame of mind to learn things without falling asleep. Your experience may vary, though.
If your new laptop came with a restore disc that can do a clean install of Windows (assuming it’s a Windows system), go for it. Vendors usually shove a lot of useless programs and annoying advertisements and free trials into retail laptops, and with a fresh install, you can start out with exactly what you want instead of dealing with a bloated system. As for the other part of your question, I think Software for Starving Students will meet a lot of your needs.
