Common Laptop Uses
The biggest advantage a laptop enjoys is portability. It is capable of any function a standard desktop computer is, and even allows for more. Laptop computers help users in utilizing their time efficiently as work can be done anywhere, including flying mid-air in an aeroplane!
The various sectors that use laptops extensively are given below:
1. Education
Students and educators alike use laptops extensively nowadays. In fact, many colleges and universities recommend incoming freshmen to have laptops. Students use laptop computers to take notes during lectures, a practice more common in colleges than lower schools. many special education students also use laptops for notetaking, or to run specialized software, such as hearing interpreters. In colleges, many professors use laptops, along with other audiovisual equipment, to project slides or lecture notes. There is a growing trend towards teachers using laptops in the classroom for lectures. ‘Learning with Laptops’ is one such initiative, which believes that laptops are a tremendously powerful educational tool that students and teachers should add to their inventory of existing educational tools.
2. How Laptops are Similar to Desktop Computers
- Microprocessor
- Operating System
- Memory
- Disk Drives
- Input/Output Ports
- SoundCard and Speaker
3. How Laptops are Unlike Desktop Computers
- Power Supply
- Display Screeen
- Input Devices
- Docking Connection
- Sony – VAIO
- Compaq – Presario
- Apple – iBook Dual USB
- Lenovo – ThinkPad
- Dell – Inspiron
2. Law enforcement
Many police officers use laptops to type incident reports immediately at the scene, rather than taking notes and typing the reports later. Police can also use laptops with wireless connections to check such things as criminal records, vehicle registrations and outstanding warrants, which saves time and can assist in making arrests.
3. Business
It is said that the business field has benefited the most from the laptop computer. Salespeople use the laptop computer to make presentations to customers, access company data over the Internet and process orders while on the move. At trade shows and conventions, it is easy to setup a laptop for a multimedia presentation of a company’s products and services.
4. Amateur Astronomy
Portability of laptop computers is beneficial for amateur astronomers as they can take them to observing sites easily. Computers are used to drive telescopes to various celestial objects. Moreover, if the telescope is equipped with a CCD camera, the laptop computer can be used to acquire, process and display the image from the CCD.
5. Entertainment
Most laptops have standard or optional internal CD-ROM or DVD drives, which allow the user to play CDs and DVDs anywhere. Laptop computers have also become a part of live music performance, where they are used to replace entire racks of synthesizers, trigger theatrical sound effects and create entirely new types of instruments.