College-bound: Which Laptop for Computer Science Degree

[Hoop]

His macbook air is still good enough. Ask him what he prefers though.

[the86d]

Used one running Slackware...

[ocabj]

PC or Mac would work. However, a PC-based computer would be better as most programming courses would likely be taught using a PC-based compiler. Intel vs AMD would be a better question to ask. Back in my schooling days, the only caveat for programming courses was to not compile using a Gateway computer as the instruction set on the Gateway math-coprocessor lacked one instruction so compiling wouldn't work properly. (shows my age)

Running emulation on a Mac would work until he gets into something low level like ASSEMBLY.

Linux is cool to have, but unlikely needed on a student's PC. He can always telnet into the school server for that type of limited work.

Mac is x86/x64, just like a "PC-based" computer. Compiling non-kernel specific C/C++ code will be generally be portable between Mac and Windows and Linux assuming x86/x64. There *might* be some inconsistencies, but even then, that can be seen even between Windows (cygwin) and Linux on the same computer (CPU). So Mac Intel and non-Mac Intel is a non-factor.

I can't confirm this is true, but I'm fairly sure that many undergraduate assembly courses use HLA or some other abstracted assembly language to teach assembly programming. HLA was written and designed by Randall Hyde, who taught my assembly course when I was an undergrad (but at that time - 1998 - he still taught using MASM). Check out The Art of Assembly Language - http://www.amazon.com/The-Assembly-L.../dp/1593272073.

This much anticipated second edition of The Art of Assembly Language has been updated to reflect recent changes to HLA and to support Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. Whether you're new to programming or you have experience with high-level languages, The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition is your essential guide to learning this complex, low-level language.

And if any school uses telnet, they should lose their accreditation.

[sd_shooter]

I was going to add "All the major SDKs are for PC only" but lo and behold, they're for Mac these days as well:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html?hl=sk

[RobertMW]

So my son is headed to Cal-Poly Pomona as a Freshman and he will be majoring in Computer Science. I want to buy him a laptop to replace his older MacBook Air (2010 model I believe).

What should I be looking for? Anything special to run any ComSci-related applications?

He will not need anything powerful or specific for the first couple years. Push him towards getting something inexpensive, and highly portable, for the first two years.

During that time period he is going to be learning

A) Basic programming skills using a very general programming language, probably C++, Java, or Python. All of which can be programmed, compiled, and run on Mac or PC usually using lite or freeware compilers. Processor and memory power is not necessary at this stage either, small, simple coding projects.

B) Assembly language, basic computer theory, operating system construction, and other mostly book learning comp-sci related classes.

C) General Education. Glad you bought him a $2k MacBook Pro to surf the internet on?

Going into his junior year, he will know what programming languages, compilers and suites that his college prefers, and can then purchase the computer that will work the best.

Also, remember that the power of a $1500 computer now, is going to be outrun by the $800 computer of 2 years later.

Personally, I would look at any Laptop brand that gives you the best deal on a 14", lower power core i5, 4+ GB ram. And if you are willing to splurge, and your son doesn't store selfies like a mad woman, get a solid state drive, it really makes a computer boot and respond immensely faster.

[MGriffen]

If you want him to be the cool kid in class then its got to be Windows 7 (ultimate if possible) NOT windows 8. Whatever you do dont get WIN 8. Next thing is to make sure its not a big name like dell or HP. Go for a Fangbook or Gigabyte or MSI or even an ROG Asus. They may be advertised as gaming laptops but for someone in Computer Science the power they offer means alot more than just for gaming. Oh and make sure it can take two hard drives. one for solid state boot drive and one for storage. thats all.

[AAShooter]

If you are a Facebook user, I would ask here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/calpolyparents/

[ocabj]

Next thing is to make sure its not a big name like dell or HP. Go for a Fangbook or Gigabyte or MSI or even an ROG Asus.

I'm sorry, but this is terrible advice for buying a laptop. If you're building a gaming desktop/tower rig, I understand the need to go with Asus, MSI, or Gigabyte as far as motherboards and maybe an NVidia reference graphics card are concerned. But you don't want a student, who will potentially need to use that laptop for 4-5 years for actual academic work, to buy a laptop which is essentially from a Taiwanese company manufacturing out of China, without any real good customer support.

Dell enterprise / upper tier support will get you 3-5 days turnaround time on laptop repair counting shipping time. Maybe 1-2 day if they actually have a support vendor come out to you.

I can't even quantify the kind of turnaround you'll get with Asus, MSI, etc.

Back when I was still the admin for the student computing department at my campus (before I moved over to campus IT security), I had to maintain a campus document for publication that had recommended specs for laptops and desktops. The key issues for any student owned computing devices were:

1. Longevity
2. Support

Unless a student was willing to upgrade/refresh computer hardware, we recommended they purchased the higher end of the performance spectrum so that it would last their 4 years of college.

Students needed to be able to make sure their device would have maximum 'uptime' in terms of usability. If their laptop died, could they get back up and running quickly? This is why we recommended getting a computer where the support covered fast repair/parts replacement.

Our department was able to secure campus agreements with Dell and Gateway (the two major Windows PC vendors in the late 90s) where they had offerings customized for our recommendations (including a 4 year parts/replacement warranty). IIRC, the warranty was in an academic support category so that it got higher priority over regular consumer purchased laptops/desktops.

The campus computer store at the time actually sold laptops from some offbrand manufacturer, but the campus store actually backed up those sales with in-store repairs (and at that time, they were pretty good about it).

Do you seriously want some kid to buy some laptop with no real support and be forced to take it to Geek Squad after a year of ownership? I hope not.

[MGriffen]

I'm sorry, but this is terrible advice for buying a laptop. If you're building a gaming desktop/tower rig, I understand the need to go with Asus, MSI, or Gigabyte as far as motherboards and maybe an NVidia reference graphics card are concerned. But you don't want a student, who will potentially need to use that laptop for 4-5 years

I understand what your trying to say. And I appreciate your outdated opinion but... I have been building computers for a long time and I can tell you right now that ALL the parts in ALL of the computers out there are going to be from places like China and Taiwan.

(Except for some of the INTEL parts but you would be pretty lucky to actually get a rig with an american made processor in it, I think the ones they actually still make here are shipped somewhere else)

Dell and HP may be an American FOUNDED business, and they may PACKAGE the computers here... Maybe... But the parts all come from the same place. And as far as customer service, man, I have vowed to never call Dell again, even for my clients. Asus actually has great customer service and I get an "American" speaking person 1 out of 10 times I call which is allot more than I can say for Dell.

The biggest issue I have with the big brands is the use of sub standard parts. The other companies I mentioned may cost a bit more but they are also using high quality name brand parts. Open some up some time and look at whats inside.

The lifetime of the computer is going to have ALLOT to do with how its treated and that's regardless of its branding. I mean if you want to pay out the wazoo for the 4 tiered monthly payments super customer support with over night shipping which ends up costing you the same as buying a new computer then by all means but I would suggest buying a better computer with better parts and hopefully not having to send it anywhere.

And the other kids will think he has the coolest computer

[ocabj]

I understand what your trying to say. And I appreciate your outdated opinion but... I have been building computers for a long time and I can tell you right now that ALL the parts in ALL of the computers out there are going to be from places like China and Taiwan.

(Except for some of the INTEL parts but you would be pretty lucky to actually get a rig with an american made processor in it, I think the ones they actually still make here are shipped somewhere else)

Dell and HP may be an American FOUNDED business, and they may PACKAGE the computers here... Maybe... But the parts all come from the same place. And as far as customer service, man, I have vowed to never call Dell again, even for my clients. Asus actually has great customer service and I get an "American" speaking person 1 out of 10 times I call which is allot more than I can say for Dell.

The biggest issue I have with the big brands is the use of sub standard parts. The other companies I mentioned may cost a bit more but they are also using high quality name brand parts. Open some up some time and look at whats inside.

The lifetime of the computer is going to have ALLOT to do with how its treated and that's regardless of its branding. I mean if you want to pay out the wazoo for the 4 tiered monthly payments super customer support with over night shipping which ends up costing you the same as buying a new computer then by all means but I would suggest buying a better computer with better parts and hopefully not having to send it anywhere.

And the other kids will think he has the coolest computer

I know everything comes out of South-East Asia. The key issue is customer support for Taiwanese based companies (e.g. Asus). We have direct experience with Asus laptops and they barely made it past 2 years for the personnel that opted to get issued them. I paid out of pocket for my own MacBook Pro because I refused to use an Asus. The customer service on those Asus laptops were poor and every single person who had one with a failed part ended up just going to a new laptop.

As far as "American" speaking (English speaking), all of your calls are being routed to India or the Philippines. If you get an actual American citizen, odds are they're the supervisor in an International call center who you got escalated to based on the specific case.

As far as expensive higher tiered support, I agree this can be an issue. But I don't know what "out the wazoo" is. But is an extra $200 or $300 that much more of an investment on a high use machine? But if you're only paying $500 for a laptop, I guess paying $300 for higher level tech support is moot, but then that brings about the issue of 'disposable' hardware.

Maybe my opinions are skewed from someone who has been in IT too long, and I value my time as much as my money. This is why I value fast tech support (parts replacement). When we spec out servers or appliances, we want fast parts replacement. If we're forced to build servers using commodity hardware, we just buy multiples (e.g. if we get a 2U rackmount with 4 drives, we'll buy an additional 4 drives just to store in a cabinet) because who wants to deal with calling the hard drive manufacturer and get a replacement in a week when the box needs to be up yesterday.

[NytWolf]

Get something the real world uses ... PC. No real-world company worth its coding ingenuity uses Macs for writing code. Enough said.

[MGriffen]

I think we both have some good points. When your talking business and servers it's a little different than buying a personal laptop. Reality is that consumer level is all very similar in cost and quality. I would choose my recommendations because I feel I would be getting better hardware and I would still be offered all kinds of different warranty's. Now if your going to go Mac (which I would not do for a computer science related goal) then that's a whole different ball game. Mac customer support is by far the best. But Mac did not design there computers to be messed with. They did not design then to be upgradeable. They are a poor choice for someone that might want to open them up and understand how a computer works. And the platform was just not meant to be manipulated compared to a Linux or windows box. If you were buying a computer for a kid taking general Ed in a community college then yeah a Mac would be perfect.

Sent from my XT1055 using Tapatalk

[Frotz]

I'm partial to the Thinkpad T series myself. I had a T42 for eight years running Linux all the time. The only reasons I replaced it was that I couldn't get a big enough PATA hard drive and the video interface had become sorely outclassed. Check out http://thinkwiki.org/ for rundowns of most Thinkpads from a Linux perspective.

[rjpsb1]

Everything ocabj says here is 100% correct.

A lightweight Mac (air obviously) laptop with vagrant/docker VMs (or VirtualBox) for any *nix action that OS X can't handle.

Docs/spreadsheets are online now.

When someone pretends to be technical or code/network savvy and then lets it drop that their l33t skillz are on Windows, they're inevitably clowns.

[castgold]

Aren't the first 2 years mostly pre-requisites and GE before the upper division courses towards the major?

I'd get the ugliest dog you can find. Colleges are target-rich environments for thieves. When he feels comfortable with his environment, he'll may be ready for a more capable machine, that won't be a couple years outdated.