Computer Science laptop help

[jiffydominguez]

I am going into computer science and i need help finding a new laptop. I am not sure what specs i need and if anyone has any idea please let me know.

I am also wanting to stay with windows over mac.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Anything around the Core i5 range and preferably 16GB of RAM will do nicely. You can get by with 8GB like I am but at times you'll be chugging. Honestly you don't need that much CPU power. For anything intensive the University should be providing you access to a server to run that code on. For really large mathematical algorithms I've had them run on the school server overnight. No point subjecting my own laptop to that sort of abuse it was never designed for. 

[Stormseeker9]

38 minutes ago, jiffydominguez said:

I am going into computer science and i need help finding a new laptop. I am not sure what specs i need and if anyone has any idea please let me know.

I am also wanting to stay with windows over mac.

Do you know what software you might be using?

 

at least go for

 

- 16GB of ram

- 250gb-512 GB SSD

- either an i5 or a AMD ryzen equivalent 

 

but I would check what software is needed and such before buying anything!

[metaleggman]

You could technically program using a phone and a bluetooth keybooard, or from a rasberry pi.  Hell, sometimes in class, if my laptop died or I didn't bring it, I'd log into the school's servers using ssh in a terminal emulator on my phone, and do work that way.  As BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said, for anything serious, you may likely have access to some sort of facility hardware to run your code (and if you don't, they likely won't require you to do anything that compute heavy).  In fact, you may be required to SSH in to submit your code; When I first took courses, we didn't use anything more than vim, gcc, and gdb, and this was only about a decade ago.

I'd say for the main hardware you should be concerned with as a beginner is just 16gb of ram, and a decent amount of storage, like 1TB (you'll have a lot of tabs open, and who knows how many programs and files you'll have installed).  The processor speed won't really matter for most of your courses, so an i3 or AMD equivalent would be fine.  One thing I'd suggest past the specs, is looking either at getting a good deal on an ultrabook, or even better, imo, a nice Thinkpad (with a trackpoint).  I've been a Thinkpad devotee since I started college lol.  The trackpoint is my preferred pointing device, over a trackpad, by miles.  They're also very durable and have fairly good warranties, along with a large number of independent shops that can do warranty work.  I'm personally a big fan of the Yoga line up, since I love having a wacom screen for writing notes in One Note.  That being said, modern windows touch screens are good enough you can get by without a wacom specific device.  Seriously though, get a touch screen, they're awesome.

(if anything I've said is confusing or weird, lemme know!  It's late, I should be sleeping, perhaps I've had a drink or two, and our power might be going out tomorrow because of fire dangers, so I'm enjoying the world wide web and my rig while I can lol!)