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Good Laptop for programming

Hello everyone

In this summer I will go to an University to study computer sience and for that i would like to have a new Laptop.
Until now I was rocking an Surface Book with an i5 and 8GB of ram.

I really enjoyied to keyboard and the the aspect ratio of the screen.
I was planning on buying an Surface Laptop 3 13 inch with maxed out specs, but i saw that it "only" had 4 Cores which had a max clock of 3.9Ghz.

Now I mostly program on my pc so I never had a bottleneck for anything.

The first 3 semesters i will learn the basics of informatics. The programming language which my uni uses is kotlin.

In those 3 semesters I alse would like to take some courses on game dev.

 

After those 3 semesters I need to chose a direction, which would be Cyber Security.
About 50% of study time are projects so I probably will programm a lot.

 

I would like to keep this Laptop at least for my uni time (so 3 years).

I really dont think that the surface Laptop will be powerful enough for those tasks.

In conclusion, I'm in search of a Laptop that will survive some years of programming with a nice keyboard, good battery life, good display and good track pad.

Before i forget, no Macs.

Thank you very much for your help. 

 

-Joel

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I think a Surface Book would be perfectly fine for those tasks - I'm doing CompSci as well and I have a laptop with a dual core i5 which has hyperthreading and it serves me extremely well. I would probably recommend doing a fresh Windows install (or giving Linux a try) if you feel like your Surface Book's snappiness has gone, but I genuinely think it'll be fine. Do you know if the game dev courses will be mostly theoretical or practical, as I know game dev at my uni is mostly about algorithms and vectors and the like rather than Unity programming for example.

Desktop PC - Xeon E3 1231 V3, MSI Z97 PC Mate, 16GB RAM, PowerColor R9 390

OS - Fedora 32 (Desktop PC), elementaryOS (laptop)

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Look at a Business-class laptop.

Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell Latitude, HP EliteBook - they offer far better build quality, durability and service and support than the consumer models like the Surface line or cheaper ones like the IdeaPad/Pavilion/Inspiron models. Business laptops come with top of the line keyboards, water resistance, dirt resistance, mud resistance, sand resistance, shock resistance and are likely to last 2-3 times longer. In addition, they have good battery life, ergonomics and screens (on IPS models)

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