Going to school online can be difficult without your own computer, especially if you choose a major that relies on a high quality computer, such as an online degree in web design. For web design students, it’s essential to get a computer that has a lot of memory and an amazing display. With these two essential ingredients, your computer will be able to handle the massive amounts of web designs that you need to store as well as the programs that you need to install in order to create beautiful web design.
Step 1. Get the Right Monitor
Web design is all about creating a top notch site design and layout. To do this, you need a monitor that can deliver on the precise image. While you may not start off with two monitors, you might eventually want to consider getting two monitors so that you can easily do multiple programming tasks at one time.
The best monitor that you could possibly buy is a LCD or liquid crystal display. These monitors are quite affordable today, and they also won’t take up as much as space if you buy a flat screen.
Step 2. Choose Memory over Processor Speed
If you really don’t have the cash to purchase a computer with a higher processor speed, you’ll be happy to know that’s not necessarily what’s important to have a great web design computer for online study. You really want to invest in memory or RAM. Extra memory will offer the better performance, which means that you can have more applications open at the same time and operate at a very fast speed. This is essential for opening multiple design programs, loading web pages quickly, working with text editors and uploading to FTP programs.
Step 3. Buy Computers with Storage
For online students, you’ll be saving a lot of your work, which can take up huge amounts of storage memory. You should invest in getting a second hard drive if you already have a computer or a larger size hard driver if you’re buying a new one. However, eventually you’ll want an external hard drive as they make it easy to back up your data and increase your performance. For instance, you can place your entire operating system on one hard drive and save all of your data on the other, thus allowing you to start your computer and load applications much faster.
Step 4. Does Operating System Matter?
Operating systems truly depend on how much you want to spend for a web design computer. If you’re looking for a top-of-the-line design computer that will be able to handle graphics, multiple applications and offer lots of memory, go for the newer Windows 7 or Windows 8 operating system. If you love Apple products and want to spend the extra money on a Mac, this is also a viable option for students. However, Mac computers don’t always offer the amount of memory that you’ll need to run all of your applications, but you’ll still pay a higher price for less memory. The key is to look at the memory and hard drive storage before purchasing different computers.
As you look for a web design computer for your online courses, check out reviews for different computers that you find. If it comes down to price comparison, go with a better quality monitor, higher RAM and storage.