Laptop for coding

[dferrero17]

I´m about to start my Computer Science course and I´m preparing everything that´ll be necessary. I have a pretty powerful custom desktop rig, however I´ll also need something portable. To solve this I´m considering refreshing my old Asus notebook, it has a i5 4200u, a GT 720M, 4gb of DDR3 RAM and a 500gb hard drive; I´m thinking of adding another 4gb of RAM (thankfully it has an easily available SO-DIMM slot), swapping out the HDD for a SSD and putting in a new battery. As far as I can see, the course starts with some Python, then branches out to Java, C#, C++... pretty much most mainstream languages. I´m aware one doesn´t need a super powerful rig to code, however do you think this renewed laptop will be a bottleneck in any way while coding? Thank you in advance.

[SupaKomputa]

"bootleneck" i'm fed up with the word. how can text editing caused problem with the computer.

Do you have any problem so far using it to code?

If you use it just to code i think it won't have any problems, unless you wanna do virtualization or graphic simulation.

By today's standard a pc should have 8gb ram and a ssd.

If you meet that with a new battery the laptop would be twice better i think.

4200u is still a good cpu. SSD would make it even better.

[wasab]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

"bootleneck" i'm fed up with the word. how can text editing caused problem with the computer.

Do you have any problem so far using it to code?

If you use it just to code i think it won't have any problems, unless you wanna do virtualization or graphic simulation.

By today's standard a pc should have 8gb ram and a ssd.

If you meet that with a new battery the laptop would be twice better i think.

4200u is still a good cpu. SSD would make it even better.

Problem is many people do not simply use text editors, they will use an IDE for large scale projects and some of these softwares are very resources heavy. 

[dferrero17]

6 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

"bootleneck" i'm fed up with the word. how can text editing caused problem with the computer.

Do you have any problem so far using it to code?

If you use it just to code i think it won't have any problems, unless you wanna do virtualization or graphic simulation.

By today's standard a pc should have 8gb ram and a ssd.

If you meet that with a new battery the laptop would be twice better i think.

4200u is still a good cpu. SSD would make it even better.

Well I´ve never dare code with it because right now it´s borderline unusable, that´s why I´m asking for an opinion on a theoretical spec sheet. Also my coding experience is extremely limited so I wasn´t sure if there would be any aspect that would be heavy of not, but I guess as long as I avoid GPU heavy programs on it I should be fine. 

[DevBlox]

As much RAM as you can reasonably get + SSD. That's it, that's all you need, everything else (good keyboard, screen) is just comfort. It's up to you to see if it's worth upgrading vs buying a new PC. You could still code on a CPU from 5-8 years ago and be fine with it. You're not breaking technological grounds by coding in general, you don't need a beastly computer.

 

I personally code on a ThinkPad T460, i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, SSD, iGPU only. If it does not break, I will still use it in 5 years. The only desire for me is to get more RAM, so I wouldn't need to close my browser to start a couple of bigger VMs, drooling over the 2x16GB, will get to buying it soon.

[SupaKomputa]

As a programmer with a dedicated desktop, i think the purpose of a laptop is just to bring your project to the client for a presentation.

Or maybe on a emergency case, you bring the laptop to the data center to debug there.

Or in your case get it to where you're learning, and modify here and there, the desktop should take the heavier load.

At least that's my laptop purpose, it's been sitting in the dust, as my main workhorse is the desktop.

[SupaKomputa]

6 hours ago, wasab said:

Problem is many people do not simply use text editors, they will use an IDE for large scale projects and some of these softwares are very resources heavy. 

What IDE? Phyton does not need an IDE, a simple text editor will do. IDE like Eclipse or Phycharm don't have high requirements.

[dferrero17]

5 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

As a programmer with a dedicated desktop, i think the purpose of a laptop is just to bring your project to the client for a presentation.

Or maybe on a emergency case, you bring the laptop to the data center to debug there.

Or in your case get it to where you're learning, and modify here and there, the desktop should take the heavier load.

At least that's my laptop purpose, it's been sitting in the dust, as my main workhorse is the desktop.

Yeah, that´s pretty much the plan, the only reason I´m looking into a laptop solution is because some classes absolutey demand something to code on in the class and I´m obviously not going to hog an E-ATX glass case around.

[dferrero17]

5 hours ago, DevBlox said:

As much RAM as you can reasonably get + SSD. That's it, that's all you need, everything else (good keyboard, screen) is just comfort. It's up to you to see if it's worth upgrading vs buying a new PC. You could still code on a CPU from 5-8 years ago and be fine with it. You're not breaking technological grounds by coding in general, you don't need a beastly computer.

 

I personally code on a ThinkPad T460, i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, SSD, iGPU only. If it does not break, I will still use it in 5 years. The only desire for me is to get more RAM, so I wouldn't need to close my browser to start a couple of bigger VMs, drooling over the 2x16GB, will get to buying it soon.

Seeing the almost insignifcant price diference between adding 4GB and 8GB, I might as well go ahead with the 8 GB, even though it won´t be the main coding device I use.

[Gawron10001]

I'll be another person that will recommend thinkpad for coding, my friend bought thinkpad t440s i7 something, 12gb ram and ssd. He is on his thrid year of computer science and he is like "Ill replace this laptop, if it's break" In general, if thinkpad comes to you working, on 4-5 gen he will probably be working fine next 5yrs

[wasab]

7 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

What IDE? Phyton does not need an IDE, a simple text editor will do. IDE like Eclipse or Phycharm don't have high requirements.

I said many people use an IDE. Doesn't matter if ide is require or not. 

[vorticalbox]

10 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

What IDE? Phyton does not need an IDE, a simple text editor will do. IDE like Eclipse or Phycharm don't have high requirements.

And even if you don't want to use am idea the best being pycharm and that's hardly stressful on resources.

 

At work I code in node with vscode I have 16gb of ram for the docker containers I have to run.

 

Main product, mongodb, websockets server and a few others.

[leodaniel]

I would take as much ram a possible  there is no such thing as too enough ram... especially if you can't upgrade later

In my experience I would not take less than 16gb, if possible 32. 

 

[Dat Guy]

On 6/30/2019 at 2:45 AM, SupaKomputa said:

how can text editing caused problem with the computer.

Don't underestimate modern "text editors" like Atom, clogging your RAM and CPU by doing nothing.

[Franck]

On 6/29/2019 at 7:39 PM, dferrero17 said:

I´m about to start my Computer Science course and I´m preparing everything that´ll be necessary. I have a pretty powerful custom desktop rig, however I´ll also need something portable. To solve this I´m considering refreshing my old Asus notebook, it has a i5 4200u, a GT 720M, 4gb of DDR3 RAM and a 500gb hard drive; I´m thinking of adding another 4gb of RAM (thankfully it has an easily available SO-DIMM slot), swapping out the HDD for a SSD and putting in a new battery. As far as I can see, the course starts with some Python, then branches out to Java, C#, C++... pretty much most mainstream languages. I´m aware one doesn´t need a super powerful rig to code, however do you think this renewed laptop will be a bottleneck in any way while coding? Thank you in advance.

Going for 8gb is a really good choice. It will allow you to handle chrome tabs and program at the same time. If you run small server apps like SQL Server, Apache/IIS locally it should be plenty. The SSD is a good upgrade too for fast boot if you are often on the go. Programming wise you won't see any gain while writing code.

 

The onboard video card is good to allow OpenGL/DirectX if you work with 3D stuff.

 

One thing to pay attention if if you plan to either run VM's or make large Java/C# apps these can take much more ram then in that case you should think going up to 12-16gb ram

[looterz]

The blade stealth is pricey but not bad for the specs, and works for programming pretty well (can even get linux running without too much trouble nowdays). The most important specs for programming will be CPU & Ram, I would also recommend using Visual Studio Code as it's very light on resources in comparison to other IDEs and can provide the functionality you need with plugins.

[Guest]

On 6/30/2019 at 1:39 AM, dferrero17 said:

I´m aware one doesn´t need a super powerful rig to code

I'm not aware of this 

For example java projects usually copy a lot of jar files around and load them into memory (e.g. zip files with compiled classes). So file I/O and also cpu power (to create or extract these compressed files) comes into play.

Nodejs projects have even more files going around.

Then you may need a database for local development (be it a docker container or something else). So what may be a deployment of 2-3 servers should be run in a light version on your machine. So get what you can! 

The spec you have looks ok to start with (as mentioned above: more RAM - don't care what you have - it's true)! You may wait a bit here and there. Once you get crazy waiting its time to upgrade 

[Beskamir]

Depends what you will be using it for. If you're trying to solve computationally intensive problems you'll need more computation.