What should a student install on his laptop?
Assuming your new laptop is a Windows machine, make sure you get Google Pack. Anti-virus, Anti-malware, Google Earth, Firefox, Google Desktop, and more, all rolled into one nice easy to install download. Yay Google.
Yahoo Widgets (ne konfabulator). It’s a nice application that lets you run a ton of small, useful and sometimes whimsical applications. For Laptops I especially like the battery meter and WiFi signal meter, much better than the ones that come with the laptop.
Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar (again, but nobody ever believes me..). In this case, because you have instant easy access to dictionary, thesaurus and wikipedia searches, right on your desktop. Other recommendations would depend on your subject area – MATLAB, for example.
Start using EndNote (if you use M$ Word) early and often – I started tracking all my course readings and research readings in EndNote as a Jounior and it has paid off BIG TIME now that I am in grad school. There are other reference managers out there, but I don’t have experience with them – There was a good discussion of it in this AskMeFi…
I can see from the tone so far that my whuffie score will take a beating for mentioning it, but Microsoft OneNote served me very well at the university. I’ve used it mostly with TabletPC’s, but it’s a very useful tool indeed on a standard laptop, and even on my desktop. Simply put, it stores and organizes notes very effectively. It’s $100, but you can get an Academic license for $50 at your university’s book store.
