Help understanding my laptop needs - Computer Science Student

Hi everyone,

I am looking to buy a new computer as my previous DELL inspiron just collapsed and died.

to do so i really am trying to understand what my requirements are - how much ssd? what graphics card? storage? screen size?

So basically, i am a computer science student, i would expect the following from my computer:
- feel fast and crisp
- run all the programming programs such as visual studio / eclipse / matlab
- i play some hearthstone / starcraft so i would like a computer that is strong enough to run those on high graphics
- not sure about the storage, i think that about 250 gigs would be enough for me

I'd love it if you guys could help me figure out exactly what i need, and if you have a good recommendation for a specific laptop that you think will suit me i would love to hear about it.

thanks alot,

yaw

 

Hi Yaw,

Right now the SSD prices for 240GB Sandisk drives are just about right for what you would pay a few years ago for the capacity in a magnetic one of the same price. It doesn't have to be Sandisk, though. PNY and Crucial are really competitive and make drives of about the same capacity or higher. There are a few that are 480GB drives which are slightly more expensive for now, but might be what you're looking for if you need to keep a certain amount of space on your hard drive for multimedia or other activities that you do with it. Anything between 120GB to 240GB is usually plenty for most users on a laptop, but going up to 480 or 512GB might be a good idea if you need the space today and have the extra money for it. The price on it will come down as newer marketing incentives push the price down to stay competitive while the price on newer drives with double that capacity will be up there. It always follows that cycle, so if 120GB or 240GB will be good for you, then I would go with that capacity. If you don't need a 512GB drive just yet, you can wait a while and always upgrade to one and transfer your data over later whenever you're ready to.

240gb or 250gb drives would be plenty for the entirety of Visual Studio when it's installed, Eclipse for Java programming, and Matlab for data analysis, mathematical work, or other types of modeling. I was able to fit all of that plus development software for Windows Mobile and an emulator for iOS all onto a system with only 160GB and still have a little room to spare. Not much, but still enough to get by with. So 250gb would be fine, but if you plan to do really large projects, go for at least 300GB or higher.

I prefer Asus laptops most of all, but there are some good models from Lenovo and HP out there still. I'm not too big of a fan of Dell, but their higher end desktop-replacement models are pretty nice. If I were to get a Dell, I would get something like the M6600 which has two hard drive bays and lets you go up to either 16 or 32gb of ram max on the board. It is a bit bulky, but like the higher end Asus Q series and Asus ROGs, it is solid metal, easy to access, and well worthy every penny. It's way heavier than most laptops, but it's a lot more durable, too. One of my most durable I've seen from Asus is the Q550LF; it's somewhere between a normal laptop and the armored tank of the M6600 at about half the weight, with all the same features. Instead of a second hard drive bay, it has an mSata half-card slot that you can use to have an SSD and still keep a 1TB magnetic drive for storage, keeping the weight at only 6lbs instead of 9 or 10 like on the Dell. If you put two SSD drives on the Dell instead of magnetic ones, you can save about 1 to 1.5 lbs there.

I didn't like Acer for a long time because of their old practices and the overheating issues, but they've changed a lot and I do have one that is nice enough to use that I think would be a candidate. It's the Acer Aspire E1. It has an AMD quadcore and can go up to about 8GB on the board, maybe more. It is fast and works well but I've noticed two small problems with the BIOS on it that make it act strangely if you replace the battery or upgrade the RAM on it sometimes, and another to where you have to patch the bios with UEFI to get access to a screen that lets you emulate and use 64 bit virtualization on the processor. You can still emulate 32 bit, 16 bit, and 8 bit OS chipsets, but it won't let you do 64 without patching that first. Even with that set, I still encounter really strange errors when trying to passthrough the usb support to a virtual machine and back again, so if you don't plan on using the Acer for any virtualization or usb devices virtualized, then you would probably be ok with one. It is extremely light-weight and very fast, it's just those two small issues that make it something to look at more closely before buying one.

For years I programmed on a netbook just because it was so incredibly light and had all the features that I needed. I gave up my 3 desktops back in 2008 while traveling again through the US and had just moved everything over to an Asus 900HA that I still have. It was the lightest (3lb) replacement for a desktop ever to exist. It's limited to only about 2gb (there are subsequent models that go up to 4gb and beyond), but it's been a great little system over the years if you don't mind the small screen on it. Something like that might also be an option since it's extremely modular if you get the right model, has a decent chipset for most of what you'd want to do (intel Atom N series or higher and integrated Intel graphics chip, audio, etc), and has a pretty good battery life for the weight and size of it.

I would definitely shop around for one, but make sure that you can get into the case easily to change out the hard drive, upgrade the ram, and that replacing the keyboard or touchpad won't be too much of an issue. You can usually make just about any decent laptop work for you these days as long as there are no major issues with it and you can get to it easily to upgrade it or change out a part if you need to.

As a rule of thumb, you always want to back up your development environments and any other data you plan to have on your laptop or netbook or any other system just to make sure you don't lose it. So if you don't already have an external drive, you might want to get one and invest a little in it just to make sure that you can back up the data for your old laptop and your new one if you ever need to replace or restore after a tragedy or issue later.

 

Hmm.. as a computer science student, you'd need a serious laptop, not a chromebook hopefully. Also, the more screen real estate you have the better, because most IDEs require a lot of space on screen. I would go for 15 or 17 inchers and if you are still bent on buying a smaller system, I would still look for a powerful processor and then buy an old lcd monitor if possible. So, you can use the screen of the lcd monitor and the processing power of your small laptop.