Hi, I'll be officially starting in Sept but I've got some summer reading. I know people use different systems but what kinds of note taking should I be doing given the sheer volume of reading I'll be doing? Are there computer programmes for this etc?

I do like written notes as I find I remember better what I have wrote down but I know just that will be nigh on impossible to recall.

Thanks in advance

I'd recommend Mendeley. It's free software that lets you highlight and annotate pdf files within the programme and it also works as a reference manager allowing you to insert citations into Word documents or export bibtex files to use with latex. I've been using it since the beginning and I'd be lost without it. You can organise papers into groups depending on category and search within your notes and the pdfs when looking for something.

http://mendeley.com/

Is this mendeley has an android version? Like an apk extension because I would like to use this on my tablet. Thank you.

OMG I have downloaded Mendeley, it's genius. God I wish I'd had this for my MA, endless days of typing and checking references! Plus the not so small forrest of journal articles I printed and annotated! Now downloading La TeX to see if I can get on weith that for writing. ;-p

If you are happy with Mendeley then stick with it. Imo of all the reference managers I have used Zotero is the most user friendly http://www.zotero.org/