What was/is your major and what desktop/laptop do you daily drive?

[DripplessNewt]

Im looking for ideas here so im curious to see what you guys did. 

[Erioch]

College was 40 years ago so no major at the moment.  I rocked a Commodore-128.

 

Majors back then were Computer Science and Math.

[BiotechBen]

Biology (formerly biotech), did all of the coursework with a 3700U Pavilion.

Currently rocking:

Victus 16 with a 5800H w/3050ti

R5 5600, GTX 1080

[Quackwich]

Did CS, but did not complete/dropped out.

 

Main PC:

- Ryzen 5 5600X

- RTX 3060ti

- 32 GB RAM

 

Laptop (my partner uses this more than me):

- Ryzen 7 5800H

- RTX 3050

- 16 GB RAM

[WiscoMetro]

I'm an environmental science and biology double major. There's a lot of overlap between the two though so my french minor actually required more extra credits and effort than the bio major.

 

I'd highly recommend having a clear path of what you want to do before beginning college. I began as an undecided but leaning towards either Electrical engineering or Computer science. Well, between my growing general distaste towards the trend of cloud based everything and especially failing calculus twice, I ended that idea in a poignant bout of failure. Dropped out and hid from my depression and failure by working near nonstop overtime at a factory job for a couple years. I had originally thought of switching to environmental science at the end there, but just couldn't continue with college in that crumbled state.

 

My favorite memory of my first go at college though has to be accidentally showing up 45 minutes late into my CS 201 60 minute midterm exam, and blasting out the code onto my paper that got me a stunning A despite the class average having been a B. No doubt due to the fact I had failed the AP Java placement exam in highschool that would have otherwise let me skip that class.

 

---

 

Then six years later in 2021 I decided to give it another go and graduated finally last year. My daily driver laptop remains the HP Elitebook 8530w that I bought used as a freshman. It saw me through college and all the intervening years between starting and finishing. Its (third) battery still lasts an hour of use, and I greatly prefer the 16:10 screen and beveled edge keys to modern 16:9 and sharp edge keys. It struggles sometimes with Firefox 115esr though so its remaining days are numbered.

 

Desktop is a custom built 6700K/3060 rig that I only recently switched to, basically only used for gaming.

 

1 hour ago, BiotechBen said:

Biology (formerly biotech), did all of the coursework with a 3700U Pavilion.

Genetics was one of my favorite bio classes, along with Limnology and Fish Health!

[porina]

Electronic Engineering, a long long time ago. My daily driver when I started that was a 486. Today it is as in sig, 7980XE based system.

[Spindel]

When I was in University I daily drove a AMD Athlon 2500+ (OCd so it showed up as a 3200+) with a ATi Radeon 9600 pro (later upgraded to a Nvidia GeForce 4400) don't remember the amount of RAM but probably something like 768 MB or something. 

 

Yeah this isn't much help to you and I'm old. 

 

(Equivalent) to masters degree in Mechanical Engineering (with major in sustainable energy production (but work with sustainable energy utilization specifically in buildings)).

 

Nowadays at home I run a M1 Mac Mini (16 GB) and my work issued laptop is a HP EliteBook 845 G10 with a Ryzen 7 7840u CPU and 16 GB of RAM. The HP is nice but I would much have preferred a M1 (or newer) MacBook (even Air) from work.

[Dedayog]

Accounting, some 25-30 years ago.  486/SX25 system w/ 4MB GPU + 8 MB Voodoo.

 

Now, still in accounting but using my sig.

[ThePCNerd129]

I use a tower... just easier to upgrade and more efficent than a laptop... the specs are below but before i built my first tower... i used a lenovo T420 laptop as my daily driver which was in like 2015 2016

[Needfuldoer]

College for me was the mid-2000s, I started with some old hand-me-down Toshiba Portege, then got a fancy HP dv5000 with some variety of Turion processor paired with a Radeon 200M graphics Dorito. If I remember right it had 4 gigs of RAM, a 128 or 256 gig hard drive, and XP Media Center Edition.

 

I think I still have that thing around somewhere; the screen and speakers are surprisingly nice for media playback. I put that poor thing through so many early games of Team Fortress 2, back before it went free-to-play...

 

I majored in network engineering, so at least it was good enough to run Cisco's virtual LAN simulator.

[Inelastic]

I majored in physics. When I was an undergrad I used a Netbook, an old Asus Eee PC from the mid 200s that I installed Ubuntu on. When I hit grad school, I upgraded to a cheap Asus, X202e was the model. I needed a larger screen for reading papers and watching "The Daily Show" when I had my lunch. My work was done on either my home desktop or on a lab computer.

[dcgreen2k]

I majored in computer engineering with a computer science minor, and I used the laptop in my sig with a Ryzen 7 4800h and RTX 2060. It was overkill for the vast majority of the work I did. The only work that really needed the power was training machine learning models and compiling Verilog.

[Lunar River]

No major. Finished high school and went straight into the workforce. My personal devices have no correlation to my line of work.

[undergroundbeef]

College was a bit over 20 years ago. CIS major.

 

I started with an IBM Thinkpad A21m. Starting with Windows 2000, but eventually various flavors of Linux.

 

At the start of my junior year I got my first Mac, a G4 iMac. I had that in addition to the Thinkpad.

 

 

[dogwitch]

Finished high school a long time ago.

then took a gap year. work at a walmart hub. left that job after almost get impaled by a forklift.

then when into accounting. also most was finished with that. but idk how or why teacher targeted me and was trying to get me kick out of the   vocational school.

got principal of the voc school and did what i normal did in the morning for the class.(showed i was targeted by teacher).

was able to switch to computer(what ever the named used back then). mid year... but i had to pack a years worth of study into 5 months......

got my certified for that. since down i.t work,secuirty for events 100k and up it also related to i.t..

started all this around 2003. after grad from highs school.

Finished etc around 2007 or 8

 

daily driver desktop is my sig flair pc.

laptop is HP - 17.3" HD+ Laptop - AMD Ryzen 3 7320U - 8GB Memory - 256GB SSD -

remotes into data base and cloud stuff. while am out in field.

 

[LogicalDrm]

Geology and Mineralogy first. I had Lenovo Thinkpad T60 (don't really remember what it had inside, bought 2007) during that time, desktop was Q6600 + 8800GT. Land Survey Engineering after that during which I had Lenovo U41-70 (2015). Don't really remember what that was either, some i5 I think. Latter part was with Huawei Matebook P400 which I still have. But as that was during COVID, I didn't have need for laptop for studies. Desktop was running 4770K from 2013 with several GPUs.

 

At work I have Intel 10th gen HP laptop. Which is probably at the end of its lifecycle. I think it might be from 2021 or 2019 even. It has hard time with some of the workload I do with ArcGIS Pro.

 

E: I don't really get the question though. Unless you are required to do very heavy rendering and calculations while you are at campus, you don't need anything special. Just something to take notes with. Most of my notes have been handwritten. I had tablet with me for reading during the latter education. But otherwise I was using department or school PCs to do assignments. Especially during latter as most of the software are only on those. And after getting into any professional workplace, they have supplied me with standardized laptop and any peripherals I need. Like waiting on my new chair for the work atm.

[Average Nerd]

As of now I have roughly 3 semesters of Gymnasium left, I started with a Thinkpad E15 Gen2 (i7 1156G7, GeForce MX 450), right now I'm running a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop, with a i5 12500H and a RTX 3050 TI.

[Spindel]

19 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

Geology and Mineralogy first. I had Lenovo Thinkpad T60 (don't really remember what it had inside, bought 2007) during that time, desktop was Q6600 + 8800GT. Land Survey Engineering after that during which I had Lenovo U41-70 (2015). Don't really remember what that was either, some i5 I think. Latter part was with Huawei Matebook P400 which I still have. But as that was during COVID, I didn't have need for laptop for studies. Desktop was running 4770K from 2013 with several GPUs.

 

At work I have Intel 10th gen HP laptop. Which is probably at the end of its lifecycle. I think it might be from 2021 or 2019 even. It has hard time with some of the workload I do with ArcGIS Pro.

 

E: I don't really get the question though. Unless you are required to do very heavy rendering and calculations while you are at campus, you don't need anything special. Just something to take notes with. Most of my notes have been handwritten. I had tablet with me for reading during the latter education. But otherwise I was using department or school PCs to do assignments. Especially during latter as most of the software are only on those. And after getting into any professional workplace, they have supplied me with standardized laptop and any peripherals I need. Like waiting on my new chair for the work atm.

OMG a rock guy! Or might I even say a Geodude!!

[igormp]

Majored in computer engineering, and I'm now doing a master's in Comp Sci.

 

My desktop and laptop during my undergrad are the ones in my sig.

 

My current setup is a 5950x with 128gb of ram and 2x3090. My laptop is a lg gram 14 (the model from 2020).

[Erioch]

14 minutes ago, igormp said:

My current setup is a 5950x with 128gb of ram and 2x3090.

Dang!

[vf1000ride]

Skipped college 30 years ago and went to a tech school.  2 years to become an aircraft mechanic.  Now 28 years later still turning wrenches on aircraft.  Work provided laptop is a Dell Latitude 7420.  Home rig is a custom loop water cooled desktop running an I9-9900K with a RTX3090.

[trag1c]

Professional software developer currently but I am upgrading my diploma to degree through night classes.

 

Current desktop is Ryzen 9 5900x with 128GB DDR4 3600MHz, 3080 ti, 2x samsung 980 pro 2TB, Samsung G9 Neo. Runs Windows for gaming, for tinkering Endeavor OS, for software development Ubuntu.

 

Laptop is Lenovo Legion Slim 7i from 2023 that I forget the specs on lol. I7 or i9 with a 4060 or 4070, 16GB ram. Windows + WSL.

 

NAS is 2x Xeon X5650, 48GB DDR3 ECC?? 5x 4TB Nas drives.

 

I use all three in the pursuit of my degree, work and hobbies.

[wasab]

I did computer engineering for 3 semesters and computer science for 5 semesters. 

 

Laptop is a budget acer aspire e5. It had a gtx 950m for gaming while being light enough and battery friendly enough to carry to the classroom. Screen is meh though. 

 

Now looking back at it, I say the perfect laptop for a student would be a snappy ultra book with long battery life. I would highly recommend a large monitor at home in which you can hook up your laptop via a display port or hdmi for school work. Macbook would be perfect for this even though I am not a fan of its operating system. If you want laptop that can also game, please buy some entry to mid range 15 inches with some semi okay battery life. Don't get bulky machines. 

 

Nowadays I do my work on a MacBook pro. I didn't really have a choice. It is a company work laptop and it has an installed security checker thing that verifies for security compliance. 

 

[StarsMars]

Just going back to college now for Cyber Security. 

Bought a used HP Elitebook 640 G9 12th gen intel i5.

Cleaned it up, put 16gb in it and a reimage. $200 for basically a new laptop. 

The one I had before was an hp dv6 from 2011. Still works lol.

 

My desktop has a 3700x, 64gb ram, 2070super and 5tb. 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/WXBWCd

[linkboy]

No college

 

My current laptop is a ThinkPad P52, which I just use for general computer usage.