

Laptop Recommendations - kgosar

What is the best laptop to buy as a computer science and electrical engineering student? Keeping in mind: portability, performance and affordability.
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spiznnx
Depends on your uses mostly.

I'm an electrical engineering student myself, though I'm focusing on computer
engineering side.

I have 3 laptops that I use.

I mostly use my Acer C720 Chromebook with crouton installed to dual boot
Ubuntu. Cost me $105, has an 8 hour battery life, is light like a feather, and
has been able to throw everything I throw at it so far. Even with 2 gigs of
ram, I can open up dozens of tabs. (I have 25 open on chrome right now with no
slowdown). The storage space is a bit low at 16gb, but its an easy upgrade to
a bigger one, 128 or 256gb is very affordable now (m.2 ssd only). The i3
version with 4 gigs of ram is probably more than enough for your classes. I
highly recommend it.

My other laptops is a Lenovo Y500 which is a powerhouse. I use it mostly for
gaming and windows dev. Its shortcoming is that the battery life is 2.5 hours,
which is understandable since it has SLI graphic cards and a i7 HQ model. The
current version of this is the Y50, which packs a GTX 960M, which is great if
you're a gamer as well, though don't expect battery to be better than 4 hours
or so.

My last laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X61t. Like other users suggested, used
Thinkpads are some of the best value in computing. I spent 120 for this one,
and it has a built in wacom digitizer, 4 gigs of ram, and a core 2 duo. It is
noticeably slower than my chromebook, but thats probably because I'm running
windows on it instead of Ubuntu. I can highly recommend getting a thinkpad and
making some upgrades, namely an SSD and maybe a ram upgrade. They're sturdy
like tanks so you don't have to worry about damaging them.

~~~
tobylane
How did you get the Chromebook for that price? Hoe easy are the internal
upgrades?

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rajeshmr
First identify your use cases.

If its mostly browsing, music, documentation and a bit of development - then a
netbook would meet all your requirements. I bought myself an asus x205ta
laptop, and can't recommend it enough. It has good build quality, and has one
of the best screens at its price range.

Weighs less than 1 kg (~980 gms), A 11.6 screen size, easily one of the best
trackpads in its price range, full chiclet style keyboard, 2GB ram that can
easily handle a dozen open tabs.. Although the built-in storage is a mere 32GB
of which approx. 20GB is available to the user. This can be expanded with a
microsd card. As i said, it all depends on your use cases. For me, this is the
laptop with the right tradeoffs ( tradeoffs i was willing to give up anyway ).

Did i mention, the sound quality is good too. No usb 3.0 though.

I have setup vagrant on this machine and ssh into it to do any linux stuff (
am a sys admin and i like to have a terminal to try out stuff / setup local
dev environment ).

~~~
rkwz
> easily one of the best trackpads in its price range

Offtopic, but I have the same model and the trackpad is atrocious! And the
wifi disconnects every 15 minutes.

And I got it from microsoft store as a signature edition model.

On the positive side, it is extremely lightweight and the battery lasts for a
long time.

~~~
rajeshmr
I read some reviews stating your issue, but i took a chance and i couldn't
have been more satisfied. Please do check if you could replace your model
since yours is a signature edition model.

I would also like to add, that i was impressed with system76 laptops. I
seriously considered buying them, but i changed course since i was unsure of
the after sales service since mine would come under international sales.

Btw, i get about 10 hours of battery usage :)

~~~
rkwz
Unfortunately, I purchased it in US and I'm in India. Not sure if I can
replace it here.

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Aheinemann
Go for a used Thinkpad T or X series with i7 processor, swap harddrive for
SSD, maximize RAM.

Thinkpads have the advantage that they are available cheap refurbished and you
still get access to spare parts (anything from keybord, screen, mainboard...)

x201t is a cheap tablet PC with digitzer, available with i7 processor extended
battery life about 8hrs.

T410 and T510 are nice ones too.

each about $200-$250 refurbished, add RAM+SSD for $350 total.

~~~
davismwfl
Regardless of brand, this is the way to go. Get a cheap machine with decent
display and CPU, then put in your own SSD and 8-16gb of RAM in it. This will
last you and you won't have broken the bank to get there.

Samsung, Toshiba, Thinkpads all can be found refurbished with a reasonable
warranty and are of decent quality. I personally, go with Toshiba and Samsung
over others just because my luck has been awesome with them. Apple is my
primary development machine now, but even a low end version isn't a budget
machine.

By the time you buy a refurb and swap the SSD and Ram you are looking at ~$500
is my bet. Say $300 for the machine, $120 for the SSD and $80-100 for Ram +
paying taxes and any shipping etc.

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fowlslegs
I purchased a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga S1 for $760 refurbised w/ a 3-year
manufacturer warranty on eBay and it's the best laptop I've ever owned.

portability: 0.76 x 12.46 x 8.7 in * 3.46 lbs * 6-7 hours battery

performance: i7-4600U * 8GB * 256 GB SSD * 12.5" 1080p touchscreen (very
bright too) * awesome keyboard * good trackpad (if you click over the raised
nubs in the top center you get a middle click which is handy too) *
convertible with very sturdy hinges * overall superb build quality (has passed
a number of MIL-spec tests) * all hardware has linux support

affordability: seems like they are going for $700-800 for refurb. w/ man.
warranty on eBay [http://www.ebay.com/dsc/Laptops-
Netbooks-/175672/i.html?_fro...](http://www.ebay.com/dsc/Laptops-
Netbooks-/175672/i.html?_from=R40%7CR40&LH_TitleDesc=1&_sop=15&_nkw=yoga+s1+warranty+i7-4600u)

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yc-akram
System76 has excellent Ubuntu Linux laptops. I use one for development w/16 GB
RAM & 2 SSD HD. With this setup I run 4/5 vm's windows/linux/plan9/etc. The
vm's are so responsive that I seldom use the 'main box' for little more than
to download iso's.

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laurentsabbah
All I can say is try and get something with an SSD drive, makes a world of
difference in terms of speed.

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sumodirjo
Macbook if you are ok with mac. or thinkpad classic series. T series or W
series should be fine for student. Whatever your choice don't forget to choose
SSD or spare budget for upgrading hard disk to SSD.

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LorenzoLlamas
I use a MacBook Air 11". Say what you will, but here was my thinking:

1\. The whole point of a laptop is portability (but not to the excess of a
device that doesn't sit on a table with an attached keyboard. You'll find tons
of "power" users that justify their MacBook Pro with a docking station to a
27" monitor, an attached mouse, a bigger keyboard, and, and, and... why not
just get a iMac or Windows-desktop at that point? They think it's the best of
both worlds, but the reality (for me) is that my data is synced online (via
iCloud, dropbox, and other tools) and that having 'one machine to rule them
all' seems pointless if I'm trying to dock the thing and really make it two
machines. Also, again, portability. No Pro comes close to the portability of
an Air. I wanted as absolutely as light and small as possible (I hear the new
MacBook (2 lbs) could also be good, but I don't know about it's power
internally).

2\. I did not want Windows. Why? Besides that it blows chunks on any sort of
development standards? Because of two reasons: First, all development
tutorials are almost always done in Macs with long convoluted exceptions for
Windows. If I was doing .NET development, I would of course consider Windows,
but unless I worked in an exclusive MS environment, with no outside coding
interests, I'd still just install parallels or something and use my Mac. There
are some naysayers who will point out minor differences between OS X and "true
Linux". As far as I'm concerned, they might as well point out differences
between Linux and Unix. Nobody runs a 'real' machine only on Linux except very
obscure people with long beards who think the MP3 is the death of music.
Sorry, but I can't relate. Which brings me to subpoint two... That I want my
machine to "just work" for all OTHER aspects of computing that I use it for
besides development. Meaning, I'm happy to hack around with Ruby on Rails, iOS
development, WordPress plugins, and the like, but I want my music to "just
work", my contacts to work (and auto-sync with my iPhone), and for the rest of
my life to be as simple as possible so that I can save my brainpower for
becoming the best programmer possible, not so I can spend a Saturday afternoon
wondering how to sync my playlists on my laptop with my iPod so that I can
listen to cool music while coding. Or having to hack some schema to see my
family's pictures while I'm on a business trip. No, the simple matter of the
fact is that Apple makes everything else super-easy. Some developers seem to
think that its a weakness to carry anything but a command-line tool to create
their offline blog posts - and hey, that's cool and all - but I have a life
and my education and career is one thing, and the rest of my life I prefer the
simple. Sorry, but basically, I've had it after 20 years of Windows.

3\. After having a few 11" Chromebooks for a while, I realized that 11" is
actually a BETTER thing because I can focus on just what's on screen. Big
screens might be good for designers, or when working on storyboards in iOS
(but really, how long are you in that mode, versus looking at code?), but for
the most part, it's just more distractions. I love Mac notification controls -
very precise and all in one place (unlike Windows). There is a 13" Air for the
compromisers, but again, I have found the portability is the best factor. Most
people don't even realize I have a laptop on my person when I whip it out.

4\. I would say that if you can afford it, to get the better processors, more
memory and storage. If you really want to multi-purpose it, get an external
HDD and a Super-Drive for backups and Time Machine (but leave them at home
when traveling).

5\. They keyboard on the Mac is still hard to beat. The screens are okay (and
you can go Retina now for the new MB), but honesty, you don't need Retina for
typing code or reading. That's just crazy talk.

Bottom line: Keep it simple, stay with something strong (metal), highly
portable, useful (in all other aspects) and from a company that supports
quality development. You'll be using it a lot, so make it easy to carry, type,
and get stuff done on it.

