Hampshire College

The Hampshire IT department will give you minimum specs on what computers to buy for word processing and e-mail. Media folk.on the other hand, need a little more power and a totally different mind set. But most importantly, we need to understand how computers work--not just read specs off of some one else's list. Our goal here at Hampshire is to make you competent and confident (experienced and knowledgable). Personally we’re not really interested in computers: just the work they allow us to make. The important concerns are the work itself and the user experience: what are you making and are you having a good time so doing? We try to fuse work and play, so at some point you won't be able to tell if you’re playing or working. Philosophically, all of this is just like mowing the lawn. It’s really all about the grass, but to get a good cut you need a good lawn mower. But wait! You’ve never bought a lawn mower, have you? Maybe you’ve never even mowed the lawn. There’s your problem!

Here are the parts of a computer, and the reasons why you should pay attention to them.

Processor: The processor chip (or chips now with multiple processors all working together) determines how fast computations occur. This “speed” is measured in Gigahertz. The current Mac Pro Tower tops out at 2.93 GHz. The higher end towers come with two Quad-Core chips, which are actually eight processors--that’s a lot. The lower machines are single chips. Those constitute four processors inside called a Quad processor or Quad Core. The eight times one is a dual Quad-Core. This is something you need to get right the first time, because processors are expensive and hard to remove and replace (at least for most people). I don’t think you can even do this in the new machines, so buy the processor now. Usually Apple offers thee versions: low, middle, and high. Never buy the low model, but don’t be seduced by the high one either. Generally I buy the middle one, but not always. Obviously there’s a lot of difference in speed between a machine with four processors and one with eight processors, but not so much difference between 3.0 and 3.2 GHz. Yet what we’re afraid of is that later Apple will set minimum software specs for processors just above the one you have, leaving you out in the cold.

Memory: It’s just a handful of RAM chips. This is the cheapest part of the computer, and has the biggest bang for the buck. Apple-installed RAM is always a little expensive, so you can hold off on this and add more yourself later. What you don’t want to do, however, is buy a chip that’s too small: all you can do is throw it away and replace it with a larger one. On laptops you may only have two slots for RAM, so get the largest chip you can in one of them and then add another later. Apple’s new policy seems to be to pre-install RAM; you no longer get to choose the chip size. For iMacs, it’s either 4 GB or 8GB. Get the 4 GB--the 8GB chips are way too expensive ($900 more!)

Graphics Card: With towers, you usually get a dual port card that can run two monitors. The more V-RAM on the card, the higher the resolution you can display. More is better here. You cannot add V-RAM to a card later. You have to replace the whole card with another one. For video work, this is an important choice. You should have a minimum of 512 MB of V-RAM. On laptops it’s what separates a low end machine from a high end one. Stay away from computers that share display RAM with processing RAM, like the Mac Book. You have to move up to the Mac Book Pro to get the display performance we expect. The trend is to move a lot of the visual processing over onto the graphics card and free up the CPU for other things. The result is a seemingly faster machine, but the down side is that the software may not want to install if your graphics card doesn’t come up to its specifications.

Storage: It’s just the size of your hard drive and the speed too. 7200 RPM is the speed we want, and the size is larger than you might think. We use 500 GB drives as our basic startup disk. That’s because we install a lot of software on each machine, but you will store all of your work on this drive also. (Apple just moved over to 650GB drives in this last product bump-up.) In addition, we use external Firewire drives for storage; you should too if you’re going to do video or audio editing. Again, if you have a tower you’ll have four slots for drives; with an iMac you get one drive, as you do with a laptop. So with these last two you will definitely need an external drive. The expenses build. You always need just one more thing and then another. . . at some point you just have to stop. Drives die or at least fill up, so we expect to replace them occasionally. They get cheaper and cheaper and bigger and bigger. (Soon they’ll all be solid state, and then we’ll have other problems that we don’t even imagine.) Again, Apple charges a little too much for their drives, but I buy at least one installed so the device will work from day one. I think I’ve replaced all the start-up drives we have and also added bigger and bigger storage drives. I try to keep our storage for each computer around 1TB. That used to sound like a lot, but it fills up fast and even faster as we move into HD video.

Monitors: For media work you can never have too big a screen nor too many of them! I love the 24” iMacs for their screen size. It’s starting to feel like the minimal size I want to work with. That’s why I have a hard time with laptops. They're just too small for me. On our tower stations we always have a minimum of  two monitors. As we move forward toward the wonderful world of HD as a life style, the standard size of 1920 x 1080 will seem normal to you too. The 24” iMacs are actually 1920 x 1200, which leaves room for a full HD image and the QuickTime controller buttons beneath it, all on the same screen. Computers are good at processing information, but not very good at displaying it. That’s why we like to have as many monitors as we can, just to see what’s going on. It’s when we don’t know what’s going on that things start falling apart.

Ports: This is fundamental. It’s why the MacBook isn’t very good for media--there’s no Firewire port at all. On the MacBook Pro there’s a single Firewire 800 port. You have to have a least one Firewire port to do video. USB is never fast enough! Recently I've lightened up on this concept with the realization that instead of using a firewire port you could also be using a gigabit ethernet connection, keep your files on an old Mac acting as a server, and get the same functionality. It's a slightly different concept, but maybe it's the way out for our portless friends if you've got an extra machine and the skill set to set it up. You can do it.

External Storage: Not all of you need this, but the video people certainly do. It’s not desirable to store video footage on your startup drive, so you will need still yet another drive. Only Firewire connections are fast enough to work. Over the years we’ve come to believe that the drives from OtherWorldComputing.com work the best for the money. We see a lot of LaCie drives, but they’re frequently dead too – in fact we had two die in the last two weeks (one got knocked over; the other had a microphone dropped on it). It’s hardly ever the drive inside that’s the problem; it’s just the case that dies. I hate those “auto-sensing” cases that turn on and off by themselves. I like a good old switch on the thing. It’s on, it’s off. Particularly if you move around from computer to computer. The minimal size we recommend is 500 GB, but the good news is that that size is getting cheaper and cheaper. There are two kinds of Firewire--400 and 800. It’s the speed of the data, with 800 twice as fast as the 400 drives. In the old days (last year) we used 400 ports, but as we move into HD with larger and large file sizes, the speed of Firewire 800 starts looking good. But it’s also nice to have a couple of different ports on your drive to give you options, i.e.400 and 800 and maybe even USB. It’s also nice to have two of the same kind of port so that you can loop the firewire signal through your drive and on to something else--maybe even another drive. Those little portable USB drives sure look cute, but they run hot and slow, so I say no to them. They’re just not fast enough for real media work--USB never is, except for music keyboards and flash drives. They are good for text and dead storage, but even for photo work they’re just slow at moving data from one machine to another.

AppleCare: Always get the AppleCare extra warranty. It’s worth the money to not have to worry about stuff breaking too soon. Certainly true for laptops!

Laptops, iMacs, or Towers: Tower machines are much more flexible. They have a lot of slots for PCI cards, drives, and RAM, but obviously they're really big and heavy and need an attached monitor or two. Laptops are light and portable, but cost a lot for what you get. Personally I like the iMacs as a good compromise between cost and power with a monitor built in. There is no right answer here; it’s all personal preference mitigated by dollars and your lifestyle (and what you think is the right answer this year). Remember you get an academic discount from the Apple store! 

            https://www.hampshire.edu/buycomputer

Above is the Hampshire page for ITs recommendations. You have to log in with your password. Remember that these are ITs generic recommendations (YMMV).

When to buy:  http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Here’s a great URL for help in deciding when to make a purchase. Computers are just products, and have life cycles that you can predict. I always think November is the best month to buy a computer. The “rule of thumb” is to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait and then buy when you absolutely have to to churn out some work. The longer you can wait, the more you get for your money and the happier you will be. The other “rule of thumb” is that your computer will always do what it does, but that you will get tired of it and want another one long before it wears out. That’s why it actually doesn’t pay to get a really low end machine; it falls off the list too fast, and you have to buy another one way too soon.

There are several events each year that we keep an eye on to help us figure out where the path to the future runs. The first of the year is the Consumer Electronic Show, CES. It’s not so much about computers as it is about the lay of the land, trends, directions, even what manufacturers think is important (vs. what I think is important). Then in March is the National Association of Broadcasters, NAB. Apple has made a few major announcements there, but it’s also a time to see what might be coming down the technology highway even if a particular product isn't for sale this year. Red Camera made its first big release at NAB, and has radically changed the professional video world since then with their range of high-end digital cinematography cameras. But so much for big events. This year Apple did a big speed bump to the product line at the beginning of March--the middle of nowhere, but you can start your stop watches now and keep track of when then next jump will be.

Finally, your own personal experience is very important. How do you get that experience? By working. You’ll learn more about computers and what you like and don’t like simply by grinding out a few projects in the labs here. Then you can form your own ideas and see what you really like instead of having to listen to other people – me included.

But wait, there’s more: It’s amazing that it’s at the end of all of this that we finally come to our senses and notice we haven’t actually talked about the real deal--the software. The computer won’t do anything for you without it. So we always tell you to get the kind of computer that runs the software you need to use. For us that’s the reason we work on Macs; we like their software the best. Why? Ease of use, sophistication, and discoverability (the ability to figure it out yourself). So what software do you need to purchase for yourself? There’s no hurry to buy anything. For word-processing, try some of the open-source software that's free. All media people should use Celtx for writing scripts. For purchased software, I’m fond of Apple’s iWork collection: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Pages is a cross between Word and InDesign (writing and page layout--I made this document in Pages first for a handout, then I copied and pasted it into our CMS software to make this page). Numbers is similar to Excel spreadsheets, but with images. Keynote is a higher-end version of PowerPoint, and more fun. For video editing, we use Final Cut Pro Studio, but that’s really a collection of applications (Final Cut Pro, DVD StudioPro, Color, Compressor, LiveType, Motion, SoundTrack) and is a little expensive if you’re not a hardcore filmmaker. You can get Final Cut Express for just editing. In the labs we have all of the Adobe applications (AfterEffects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash), but you may never use some of them. For audio work we use ProTools, Logic Studio, Live, SoundTrack, and Audacity (free). Then there are the good old iLife applications we also use (iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, iWeb, and GarageBand), which you get free with your Mac.

To repeat: don’t rush to buy stuff you don’t need. The only way to know what you do need is to do some work and find out for yourself. The other reason I don’t want you to buy everything is that I think you miss out a lot by not working in the labs for your first semester. That’s where you can meet people and learn good work habits. If you’re off in your room, you have the illusion that you’ll get a lot more work done, but we don’t usually see that in the end. Furthermore, we still don’t know you when you do need help. At Hampshire you need to build personal relationships with staff, other students, and faculty.