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

[WhitetailAni]

Haven't started college yet, am in the fall. Going into civil engineering, currently have:

- Ryzen 5 3600, 4x16GB RAM, RTX 3060, various forms of storage

- Mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro

 

Probably going to upgrade the laptop, but not sure what yet

[da na]

Music and English major.

 

Desktop is an HP z840 Workstation, 2x Xeon E5 2699v4/RTX A4500.

Laptop, well... I have a lot. I usually pick out an HP Pavilion (from the '06 to '09 era they were actually good), those are my favorite.

[LogicalDrm]

On 3/29/2024 at 7:22 PM, WhitetailAni said:

Haven't started college yet, am in the fall. Going into civil engineering, currently have:

Pretty much any civil engineering, urban deveploment etc. will get automatic thumbs up. Like there was a time when I wondered whether being techie with non-tech first job was oddity in this community.

[saintlouisbagels]

Mechanical Engineering. I went to college in 2011 and dropped out 2015. I failed a TON of classes - I'm not that close to finishing my degree.

 

College (2011-2013);

issued ThinkPad W-series. Their workstation series with Quadro cards because we need to use SolidWorks, MatLab, and LabVIEW.

 

College (2013-beyond);

refreshed laptop for Juniors. ThinkPad T-series. For some reason they switched to the GeForce models even though we were still expected to run the engineering software, wtf.

 

After college (2015-2017);

I bought a high-specced Dell XPS 15. Had SO MANY issues with it. Swollen battery twice, failed motherboard twice, display died, etc.

 

2017-present;

Finally built a Windows desktop and played a bunch of games. I do a fair amount of Photoshop and Lightroom. It's my first time owning a gaming desktop... but I feel like I've already fallen out of love with gaming? Currently equipped with 2080 Ti.

 

2021-present;

MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro - this laptop is a ****ing beast. Amazing battery life, speakers, microphone screen, etc. The only problem..... I got the 16GB RAM model and I'm constantly using Swap memory. I use it at work for 10hr days and battery is a non-issue, and I frequently use it for the entire duration of my 28hr flight+layovers with no charging in-between.

 

2023-Present;

Mac Studio M2 Ultra - this machine flies. It crushes everything.

 

On 3/21/2024 at 12:29 AM, DripplessNewt said:

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

I'm confused. Are you looking for ideas for what to use during college, or for what own in general regardless of college?

 

I love the Apple M-series laptops, but they are extremely limiting if you're expected to run certain software for classes or if you want to be social with fellow gamers and it turns out you cannot play the same games as everyone.

 

I'm trying to keep in touch with friends via gaming, but having a Mac makes it so limiting, so I have to keep my Windows PC plugged in at all times solely for the gaming nights. I WISH Helldivers 2 didn't use such a terrible anti-cheat system.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

Chemistry, later got my PhD in Physical Chemistry.

 

Used a Q6600 with a Radeon HD3870X2 as a Desktop, but mostly worked on a Dell Vostro 1310. Later upgraded to an Asus Zenbook, better for conferences and writing. In addition, used plenty of weird linux machines (for scientific instruments) and on remote workstations and the HPC systems.

 

Currently running a Framework 13 (i7 1165G7, 32GB RAM) as my personal laptop, a 5800X3D with a 3070 for my Desktop. At work we use Lenovo Thinkpads (P15 and T14 I believe) plus some Lenovo workstations for more heavy lifting. The latter is pretty much the epitome of overpriced workstation for business: dual Xeon Gold (12 cores each, not sure which model but something with 6000) with 768GB of RAM. Suits my needs, though.

Cost more than my car, could have gotten something much more economical for that but of course: use the preferred vendor and budget is IT anyway. And they had it laying around already, anyway from some previous procurement and were happy to shift that expense to our department.

[lukeisatwat]

Doing secondary school (Year 11) 

 

My current computer is a CM storm (which my aunt kindly gifted me) from 2011-2012 with a core i7 2600k, 24gb ddr3 1333mhz, and a 1050 Ti (which I assume was upgraded to down the line)

 

Runs what I play nicely, the 24gb of ram is pretty overkill in my opinion. Most utilisation I have seen out of it is 12gb.

[Flavius Heraclius]

My major in undergrad was computer science. I daily drove an old (even at the time in 2012) Dell Precision T7400 workstation that my uncle gave me. It had some random Quadro GPU and a quad core Xeon processor. Over the years, I upgraded it with a GTX 950 graphics card, dual quad core Xeon processors (forget the model numbers--they predated or otherwise lacked hyperthreading), and 20-odd GiBs of mismatched RAM that I installed in completely wrong slots and wound up accidentally losing huge amounts of performance because of it. You think putting all your RAM on a single channel on a desktop board hurts--wait 'till you have four channels and NUMA. Whoo--I dropped the ball on that one. But it did work! It ran Windows 7 for most of that time, but I did upgrade it to Windows 10 when that finally came out.

I still use that machine (with the RAM installed correctly now) running proxmox as a virtual machine host on my network--though at this point it's probably worth it for the electricity savings alone to upgrade to something more modern.
 

For laptops, I had a Toshiba Portege ultrabook that I used. It originally ran Ubuntu, but I quickly moved on to Arch Linux. Honestly, though, I didn't use laptops much back then. I was mostly a paper notebook at school and desktop at home guy.


My current rig is relatively old too, though I just upgraded the GPU. It's an Intel 8700k with 32 GiB of memory and an RX 7800XT GPU. I use a couple of old Thinkpads as laptops depending on my mood on a given day (T420s, T430, and T480).