Programming Laptop

[EightBits]

Hey, my current laptop is slowly breaking down... what was an initial sometimes crash is now instant restart on the smallest shake, a recharge port that works only when applying pressure and doesn't power at all sometimes, I was planning on building my own pc, I saved up money for it and now I have to spend it all on a new laptop for school and work.

I found these laptops and I wasn't sure if for programming they'd do the job, I'm more worried on the processor side...

 

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lenovo-ideapad-s145-15-6-laptop-grey-intel-core-i3-1005g1-512gb-ssd-8gb-ram-windows-10/14364405
https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/asus-vivobook-15-6-laptop-amd-dual-core-r3-3200u-512gb-ssd-8gb-ram-google-home-mini-charcoal/B0012924

 

Which one should be good?

I also found this:

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/hp-15-6-gaming-laptop-black-amd-ryzen-5-3550h-256gb-ssd-8gb-ram-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-win-10/13893448

but it is barely under my budget, and I'm trying to save as much for a future PC build.

 

Thanks!

[luckyyounes]

I think the Vivobook will do but try to buy it seperated from the home mini imo

[hishnash]

do you know what platforms you will be developing for? if your going to be doing web/server development most likly you will want to be working on a posix style system (a mac or a linux machine).

if you have the funds the 16" MacBookPro is a very good machine and it will last you a long time.

 

if you prefure to go with linux then if you get a laptop you need to check how it might be supported, things like wifi and integrated/dedicated gpu switching can be painful, in particular when you try to connect to more `advanced` wifi enterpise networks like those you might have in unis. You will need to find a laptop that has good support your your choses distor (this is easy the older the laptop is, but if you want a recent laptop this can be quite a mindfield if you want all its features to work well).

 

when it comes to cor specs my suggestion is to not get anythign under 16GB RAM. And an highspeed good SSD is very helpfull as you will find yourself running lots of VM/docker containers most likely. Also make sure you have enough internal storage (at least 512GB) once you have mutliple SDK versions, with debug symboles + a few VM images
 

[hishnash]

12 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

If they don’t have the budget you can get the Air with 16GB of RAM and a quad core

True the Air with 16GB should be good, performance is quite low if you want to run mutliple VMs through

[hishnash]

52 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Could just bootcamp if you want windows. For coding you can get away with using MacOS instead of Linux.

Yes very true, VM images are useful for more than selecting the OS (i was not thinking realy of running windows in a vm).
It can be useful for reproducing your production setup on your local machine.  But you are right can get away with just running this directory on macOS and use a lot less in the way of CPU demand.