Factors when buying a computer.

            A computer has become a vital component in a modern students life, so picking the right computer is an important decision which has many important factors that need to be considered when choosing. Laptops are a definite choice as they are light, easy to transport and good for during class, to take notes etc. Looking at the brands is also important as some brands are better than others, i would recommend apple as it has been voted as the best laptop brand by "Laptop Magazine" this year. However apple is quite expensive so if you can't afford a mac there are other good brands to buy.
I have found two laptops, one apple and one Dell inspiron both are good laptops and have a completely different price
1. http://store.apple.com/ie/configure/MD101B/A?  Mac 13"
2.http://www.dell.com/ie/p/inspiron-15-3520/pd?oc=n0015m14&model_id=inspiron-15-3520 Dell 15.6"
            When looking for a computer what is essential? As a college student there are a few things we need to consider before buying a computer.  Firstly RAM, RAM is basically the computers memory and the least amount I think that you should get is 4GB, sometimes you can pay extra to get 8GB, for example with the MAC laptop above it is €100 extra for the extra 4GB. It depends on what course you are in, i'm in applied psychology and at the moment we do a lot of multimedia which means we would go for more RAM on our laptops as we need more. Next is the processor, the speed of the computer, the normal/average speed in 800MHz but with both of these laptops they have a speed of 1600MHz which is good for college as many of the lectures and notes are now all online. Hard drive is also important and this is another which the rule is the more the better,  the average is about  500GB. The Rule of the more the betterthis same for most aspects of laptops as the more you have generally the better it is and the longer it lasts i.e RAM+MHz.
            There are some things we need to consider when buying a laptop when we are in college, for example the weight of the laptop as we have to carry them around with us, the Mac i have chosen is 2.06kg and the Dell is 2.4kg these are both quite good weights and will benefit from spending a little extra to buy a laptop cover, which can be cheap. Neoprene is a good type of cover as the fabric is very resilient and can be bought on amazon or ebay quite easily and cheaply. Battery power is also important  and the time a full battery lasts is important to consider. The Mac has up to 7  hours and the Dell has about a 3 hour battery life.
           Something that is also very important for any laptop/computer buyer to consider is anti-virus software, if the computer doesn't have it built in it is essential that you an some anti-virus program me, or some can be free and downloadable which is also fine. With any Mac computer, it is not impossible but it is very very unlikely that a Mac will ever get a virus. Programmes are also important and you should always have or download Microsoft word and the other word programmes (Powerpoint, excel etc.) it is also very useful to get a dropbox or google docs account because you can backup a lot of your work which is very important. You should always back up your work on some sort of network or cloud  site.
           I personally (possibly with some bias as i am an owner) would choose the Mac because they are very good computers that do not weigh a lot, have a lot of memory, are quick, and generally virus free. But everyone is different and has different needs which they need to consider. I hope this helps people and feel free to comment on this article.

References 
http://johnlamansky.com/tech/laptops-for-college-students/
http://www.stateuniversity.com/blog/permalink/Choosing-a-Computer.html

An Area Of Technology that interests me

                An Area of Technology that interests me is Twitter, i have been on twitter for a few years and have noticed how popular twitter has become as a means of communication.  But what exactly is twitter? "Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets"."       
                Twitter is quite easy to use, once you sign up you can find other users name by searching them and to follow them all one has to do is click a button. Twitter also has a very popular and important feature called "trending topics" which shows what is being talked and tweeted about all over the world, you can look at worldwide trending topics or by country, this has helped to make twitter an important journalistic tool in more recent years.  
                Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 after a ¹"Daylong brainstorming session"which resulted in the launching of twitter in July.  Twitter, however didn't become popular until 2007 when it was used in a conference (SXSWi) where the members of the conference could keep ¹"tabs" on each other and the messages were broadcast live on two plasma screens at the conference.  Since then twitter has been rapidly increasing in popularity from 65 million tweets a day in June 2010 to 340 million with 140 million users on the site in March 2012. 
                 Twitter seems like a simple enough concept that in theory shouldn't be as popular as it is, so why is it so popular? One of the reasons that it is popular is that it gives people a chance to keep up to date with people all over the world.  It also means that people can follow the people that they look up to i.e scientists, politicians musicians etc., following them means that they can always know what the people they are following are doing, the gigs they will be doing, the tv shows they will be on, and the articles they are interested in. Twitter is updated constantly and acts as a medium between its users and their followers, the information can be posted and all of their followers will instantly be updated without any hassle on the tweeters part. Twitter has also become a brilliant and vital journalistic tool, with many news channels and newspapers having and regularly updating their pages. Twitter is sometimes the first place where the news is broadcast as it is so easy and the information is quickly broadcast all over the world. The journalists can also use twitter to gain information because of the sheer number of users.  There are many different reasons why twitter is and will continue to be one of the internets most popular social media network, and no doubt will be improved by the creators as the demand for improvement increases. 
                I am a big fan of twitter and i use it on a weekly basis, both tweeting and reading tweets. I think it is a brilliant tool the modern and tech savvy world. News can be broadcast all over the world in the space of a minute and all of the celebrity news can be broadcast, keeping the fans updated on a constant basis, this benefits both the tweeter and the follower without a lot of effort on either users parts.
The sheer fact that there is 140 million users must mean something? 
And the 340 million tweets a day must count for something? 
References 
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
2. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=twitter-what-is-it-good-for-2009-02-13

Pavlov's Dog! =] Haha

Useful and interesting links for our course!

I have found some good links for our psychology course which i think are useful and interesting and will help in our understanding of our course.

1.This one is good for our multimedia class which we do a lot of photoshop in, this website has tutorials
for photoshop
http://psd.tutsplus.com/
This is also a site which has tutorials on photoshop
blog.templatemonster.com/2011/04/01/44-grunge-photoshop-tutorials/

2 These links are just psychology ones that i find interesting
http://documentaryheaven.com/category/psychology/ - this one has loads of documentaries
http://www.psychologytoday.com/
http://www.spring.org.uk/ This is a psychology Blog
www.psychworld.com This is an interesting site for Perception and ergonomics aswell with a good article on the "bloody mary illusion"

Hope these help!

Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit

Just found an interesting page which has facts about psychology that you probably wouldn't know
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8dGf6A/:16mr+1Hqw:G8-3jllD/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201110/25-surprising-facts-about-psychology/

Introduction

Hi my name's Robyn Maguire I'm 18 and I live in Dun Laoghaire.
I am in my first year in college, and i'm studying applied psychology in IADT.
I've always been interested in psychology and the study of the mind and so far i'm still interested.
What's good about applied psychology is that we always relate what we are learning to the world around us, we also study a lot of other interesting courses that are related to psychology.
At the moment we have multimedia and design and ICT classes, in mm + d we do photoshop design work and in ICT we learn about technology.
The internet has become an essential tool for education and learning and I think it is very important to understand the the internet and technology are the way forward and that technology is always developing.
Apart from Psychology I love music and film and i'm interested in drama and dance.
I haven't really got much else to say but i will soon be posting about some technology i'm interested in and some other posts about psychology in general.