Well, well, well. It’s been quite a back-to-school week here at CrunchGear. We learned a little bit about affordable notebooks and netbooks, what time-draining video games to avoid and even what to do about feeding yourself now that you’re on your own.
To close out the week and in honor of Friday, we got a little dorm room light show for you after the jump. Remember to have a little fun while you’re pretending to study – that’s what college is all about, after all.
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Tired of your boring home town? Want to “see the world” like you’re the star of a Disney Channel movie? Do what I and countless others have done—go abroad for a few months, experience a new culture, then come home all like, “Um, now what?” Very exciting, yes!
To that end, I’ve compiled a few odds and ends that might make your trip abroad less annoying. You know, gear, junk, wisdom, etc.
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It’s decision time. Which should you buy for school, a notebook or a netbook? Netbooks are great because of their portability and low price points. Notebooks are good for their much more usable keyboards, optical drives, and computing power. So which one is right for you? Here are five good options in each category.
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If there’s one very-important rule when it comes to schoolwork, it’s to save early and save often. I’d also add that you should save elsewhere, too. So here are five options for backing up your files.
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After 3 months of fun in the sun, it’s easy to forget just how much easier gadgets can make your life once class time rolls around. Unfortunately, it seems like the more useful they are, they heavier a beating they take. With each new year comes new people, new parties, and new opportunities for your gadget to disappear or get busted into a million pieces.
We here at CrunchGear love gadgets, and we love you. In turn, we love your gadgets. That’s why we’ve compiled a handful of ways for you to prep your gadget collection for the upcoming scholarly session. Enjoy!
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Ok, you’re supposed to be a grownup now. What are doing still drinking that Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill? In fact, what were you doing drinking that ever? You should be ashamed of yourself. You probably clicked on this link thinking you would get some good booze advice. Well, you were right and you were wrong. Instead of telling you what to drink, I’m going to tell you what to stay away from.
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Well, look at that. Off to college and suddenly it’s time to learn how to (theoretically) fend for yourself. You can’t fill up on nasty food court or cafeteria items all the time, but luckily it’s really not hard to cook up some down-home vittles right from your dorm or (hopefully) your first apartment.
Here are some basics that you’ll need to get you through mealtime.
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Note: Not a must-have.
Here are a few dorm room gadgets we think you might be able to use at school or home to keep yourself online, in-touch, and entertained without much set-up time.
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Picking the right TV to pimp out your dorm is important. You don’t want to be the poor kid, sporting a tube TV but then again, you don’t want to spend all that open house cash just on a plasma. I’ve got a few solutions that will work nicely with your understandably low budget.
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Before you go humping down to Best Buy to pick up a PC, let’s ask ourselves a few questions. The rise of desktop replacement laptops – laptops with full-sized processors, hard drives, and lots of memory – have essentially supplanted the desktop PC in dorm rooms every where. Why pay $500 for a big, noisy box when you can potentially drag your $700 laptop down the hall to watch a DVD in another room or even take it to class?
Then, we have to think about Mac vs. PC. We’re a bunch of Mactards here at CrunchGear, so we’re going to recommend seriously looking into Macs to folks on campus or in school. There’s something I like to call the “Day of Shame” when it comes to Windows machines. The “Day of Shame” starts out fairly normally – you install a new peripheral or try to format a disk drive and you end up trying various installations, reboots, and incantations in order to get the PC working again. This can happen to anyone – it used to happen to me pretty regularly – and it basically wastes a full day of troubleshooting before the PC miraculously fixes itself. I’ve never had that problem with OS X.
That said, here are our desktop picks for 2008. All pricing and specs are based on base configurations without add-ons. What are you looking for? Power and price. Most PCs are over 2-gigahertz right now and 2 gigabytes of memory is about right for the average user. The real draw is a bigger hard drive for movies and music.
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I think it’s safe to say that 90 percent of you Collegians have iPods and 100 percent of you probably use those eardrum-popping white earbuds. Get rid of those immediately because I doubt you’ll want to trade them in for hearing aids in a few years. As I’ve said in the past, in-ears are where it’s at, so you better jump on the wagon. And we’re not going to recommend those crap in-ears from Bose or Sony. It’s worth the extra $50 you’ll be spending on the following in-ears. Trust us.
Over-the-ear cans are clunky and if you wear glasses or sunglasses then you know how annoying they can be after 15 minutes of wear. Besides you’ve got enough crap in your bag since Amazon hasn’t rolled out their college-edition Kindle.
Oh, and don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about the gamers.
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Original Photo Credit: Striatic on Flickr
“You’ve got a lot of studying to do, young man/lady. If you keep playing that damn Nintendo I’m going to throw it out the window!”
Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. Ever since the birth of home game consoles, academic performance has suffered (at least if you ask Mom). Back in the day, it was Metroid keeping me from finishing my homework, but these days I have quite a few distractions that keep me from finishing posts or writing up reviews. Read on for a few games that you, as a hardworking student, should probably avoid.
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So this is your first year of real independence and trust me, you’ll want to document every possible thing. That’s probably one thing I failed to do during my collegiate days. Girls making out and possibly showing you their hooha’s are something you’ll want to hold onto while at college. You never know when you’re going to need to blackmail said hooha to get test answers. And I know some of you are strapped for cash, so we’ll check out a couple point-and-shoots, DSLRs and maybe a video camera or two.
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Students! You’re going to be spending a lot of time, on and off the quad, listening to music. I made it through college with an MP3-CD player, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Click through for our list of best MP3 players for a college student.
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Welcome, children. Please find your seats. This year is very important for you all. It’s the year HD formats have settled comfortably into the mainstream and console gaming is at its apex. PCs are falling by the wayside for most of you and laptops – and ultralight netbooks – are become an interesting addition to your arsenal. We’re living in an era of cellular revolution and all of you want iPhones but don’t want to spend big buck. Finally, you’re not buying what your parents tell you to buy.
So welcome to CrunchGear’s Back to School week. We’ll try to produce a few stories this week that will offer tips on buying gear and gadgets for school. We won’t pretend that you have money to burn or that you need a 42-inch TV in your dorm room. We know you probably already went shopping last week but here’s what you should buy when mom and dad are exhausted on the couch and they tell you to go get a laptop, a cellphone, or some software – after all, you know this stuff better than they do anyway.
