New Comp Sci Student in need of help

[RaimbowTrololed]

 

I'm a first year in CS with a few questions to find an ideal PC.

Which specs to go for?

Reliable brands, things to avoid.

Should and how can I back up my files? External SSD, NAS, both? which ones are particularly reliable?

 

For my school, I have the following requirements:

Processor: 8th gen inter core i5

RAM: 16GB DDR4 Ram

Hard Drive: 500GB 7200RPM Sata or 240GB solid-state (SSD)

Graphics Card: 2GB AMD or Nvidia discrete graphics card

LCD Screen: LCD capable of 1920x1080 resolution

Wireless: Dual-band 802.11 ac/g/n

Operating system: Windows 10 Professional 64-bit or Windows 10 Education 64-bit (available from IST Software)

Battery: 8 hour min

Warrenty: 3-year warranty

 

If you have any tips or advices for any of the questions, any computers that'd fit within a reasonable price range online ect. please let me know!!

I'm pretty new to researching for computers so any type of help would be tremendous

 

If you want to give me a direct response since this is my first forum you can DM me in discord: Gerald#6744

 

Thank you so much for looking at this post! :)

[Jtalk4456]

So couple questions to narrow things down

Budget: 

Specialization: (programming, networking, security, etc.)

Expected Software usage: 

Do you do any gaming? If so what games:

Are these the requirements by the college or what you are looking for? I've not ever seen a college require that you use a gaming computer with close to new generation processors and not even giving the option for AMD. 

I assume Laptop since you mentioned battery life. Are you supposed to take this laptop to classes or is this going to sit in your dorm? If it's staying in a dorm room, you can also go for a desktop. If you can consider desktop, would you buy prebuilt or build yourself?

Also if we're getting a laptop, it'll be harder to find exact specs with a pro license. Most laptops come with home, and most that come with pro are designed for "business" use and do not have a gpu.

3 year warranty is probably the first thing you'll give up on. 1 year limited manufacturer's warranty is standard on computers. Of course you can pay for a longer one, if this is what you mean by 3 yr warranty, then I suggest checking out squaretrade.com

They're pretty all inclusive and easy to deal with if you have to use the warranty for anything

Also 16 gb doesn't come cheap especially in a laptop. Be ready to pay more for that. 

[harryk]

Curious as to what kind of CS program requires this level spec? Also why Windows and not Linux?

 

In a typical CS curriculum you'll be spending most of your time programming simple scripts and programs for which even a Raspberry Pi is overkill in terms of performance. Some higher level courses and electives may involve 3D rendering or large data set crunching but even then for the purposes of education you really don't need great hardware. 

[brob]

12 hours ago, RaimbowTrololed said:

Battery: 8 hour min

This suggests that a laptop/notebook is required. 

 

Like @harryk, I wonder at the specs. By current standards CS programs usually don't require that much computing power.

 

Take a look at Dell, Lenovo, and HP notebooks. Other very good brands are Asus and Samsung.

[celerystruct]

By requirements do you mean what you're looking for? Because I can't think of any CS program, undergrad, or grad or even boot camps, that specifically require an 8th gen intel CPU.

 

If you're shopping around for a computer to play games on while doing school work just ask for a gaming computer. It'll be more than enough for all your classes.

 

If you want a laptop consider getting a mac if you were interested in doing iOS programming.

 

Otherwise for backing up files just use google drive and github.

[everettrules]

I would not go with a mac, there os is trash, i would get a decent "gaming" laptop off of cragslist. If you want new go ebay or maybe cragslist

[celerystruct]

8 hours ago, everettrules said:

I would not go with a mac, there os is trash, i would get a decent "gaming" laptop off of cragslist. If you want new go ebay or maybe cragslist

I was suggesting it in case he wanted to do iOS programming. Also there I'm not a mac person personally but it shouldn't be a problem for him whatever CS course he's taking.

He doesn't even need a gaming laptop he could just get a cheap thinkpad and that'd be sufficient.

[everettrules]

Yeah the thinkpads are hard pretty good if you get one off of ebay