Two students were asked the following questions:

• What is your name?
• What level of education?
• Do you have a home computer?
• Can you tell me a little about your computer

  and what you use it for

Student 1 – Adam (1st Year College Student)

Hi, I’m Adam and I am a first year Networking Engineering Technology student.

The main things I use my computer for are gaming, running server applications like web and file servers and doing a lot of virtualization, which is running several operating systems inside of the main operating system.

I have a really big monitor so I can keep track of a lot of things at once.  It is 24 inches and it allows me to have several applications open at the same time.  For instance, I often have a both web browser and a word processor open when I am doing research so I can research and type at the same time, this is very handy.

Another one of the most important parts of a computer for me is the RAM.  Most people don’t really need a lot of RAM.  However, it you start doing a lot of multi-tasking like I do with several things running at once you will find that if you don’t have enough RAM it can really bog down your computer.  This is because your operating system will try to use your hard drive and your hard drive is a lot slower than the RAM. 

The video card is another important component.  I have a very nice GTX280 which is great for playing all the new high end games.

The next very important thing is the processor.  Without a fast processor, all your other components will run slowly.  I have a quad core processor and it is very fast and lets me do all of the multi tasking that I want to.

Student 2 - Brittany (Grade 12 High School Student)

Hi, I’m Brittany.  I am a grade twelve student and I was asked what I use my computer for.  I have a computer but I am not a ‘huge’ computer user. 

I use it personally for things like MSN and Facebook - basically chatting with friends.  I also like to watch online movies and TV shows and I download LOTS of music.

For school, I use my computer to research information for projects, make presentations and do word processing.

That’s pretty much it, as I said I’m not ‘huge’ computer user.