Help choosing laptop

elastic

My son needs a laptop for college. He's doing electronic engineering. He has chosen a Dell 15-5000 in Curry's for £599. Its i5-8250U. 8gb. 2TB HDD with integrated graphics.
Son says he needs to use lots of 'large and intensive' software and doesn't want SSD as it would be too small and he doesn't want to cary an external drive. Hubby wants son to have one with dedicated graphics, but Son thinks this isn't necessary. As I don't know how to resolve this dilemma, I would really appreciate help!

debitcardmayhem

Point them at this thread https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5889466/refurbed-laptop-are-specs-suitable-for-uni-and-home


But the description

lots of 'large and intensive' software

means nothing

that

Personally think you are being taken for a ride, something smells fishy to me, but I was born a skeptic. Most number crunchers use memory and speedy disk. Very surprised if the students files, especially for Collage are that big to warrant 2T, perhaps not even an i5 . Doing a phd in certain fields maybe.

Phone or email the collage, as for recommendations and if they have any deals, or business tie-ins


Electronic calculations are fairly straight forward, and from what I remember the only CPU hungry program i used was a component layout and PCB designer and plotter package which ran slow on my 386

The electronics arena has shrunk a fair bit from its hayday in the 80's, the time Totenham Court road were full of electronic shops and people could read colour codes on resistors. Computing is the one to be in

Curries/PC worlds are often not the cheapest. Would suggest you purchase a second hand ex-business range machine as they are usually built much better than consumer models, secondly second hand are cheaper, but I do not know your model. Also look a the dell online refurbs shop

elastic

Son says he wants to run software that is resource heavy and takes up lots of hardware space. He uses programs like Visual studio, Autodesk Eagle. He's not a gamer, outside of things like sims and Minecraft. I should have pointed out that he has autism, and uses his laptop for just about everything!

Savvy_Sue

elastic wrote: »

As I don't know how to resolve this dilemma, I would really appreciate help!

Stay well out of it.

Are you / your husband paying for your son's laptop? If you're not, his call. If he gets it wrong, still his call.

elastic

I'm paying!

that

for Eagle from the autocad page the only requirements are below:Microsoft® Windows® 7 or newer is required.

EAGLE 64-bit requires a 64-bit operating system.


for Visual studio

• 1.8 GHz or faster processor. Dual-core or better recommended
• 2 GB of RAM; 4 GB of RAM recommended (2.5 GB minimum if running on a virtual machine)
• Hard disk space: up to 130 GB of available space, depending on features installed; typical installations require 20-50 GB of free space.
• Hard disk speed: to improve performance, install Windows and Visual Studio on a solid state drive (SSD).
• Video card that supports a minimum display resolution of 720p (1280 by 720); Visual Studio will work best at a resolution of WXGA (1366 by 768) or higher.

That Dell far exceeds the require spec. Think it is a laptop for minecraft
There are some newer technology creeping in which may date a laptop sooner, rather than later. One is M2 SSD drive about 3 times the speed of sata. The other is the new wpa3 (think October-ish) wifi standard which may or may not be fixable by software?

Owain_Moneysaver

Edit to say - as noted above, neither Eagle nor Visual Studio are particularly onerous and nothing like the spec of the laptop mentioned.

You can get 15.6" (1600x900) Core i7-2640M 2.8GHz 8GB 320GB for £320 from Microdream. Tier1Online are also a good source for refurb computers.

It's likely the uni will have a computer lab with the engineering and analytical software on it; student will need a laptop with MS office (or Libreoffice, etc) for essays etc.

SSDs are ideal for laptops, apart from being a lot faster they use less power on battery and are much less fragile mechanically if the laptop is bumped whilst working.

If he's already at college, what machine is he using at the moment, and why does he need a new one?

I know things have changed, but when I was at uni 6 MB RAM was considered enough ... on a mainframe used by 200+ students concurrently.

elastic

Thanks for all your advice! It's very difficult when you are not a techie yourself! From the research I've done, it would appear that the 8250u is a good move, and it appears you all lean towards SSD rather than HDD, but what about the integrated/dedicated graphics question? Also, do you have any suggestion of brands/models? I want to get the best I can as his tech is so important in his life, but he gets very set on things so I need the knowledge to either influence him or even put my foot down!

debitcardmayhem

Post #2 pointed you to a thread about a refurbished laptop from Dell which has an SSD and an HDD(1TB not 2), an older processor but was an i7 which would easily cope with his needs. However he may not wish to accept a refurbished machine, but with the two drives it would boot up a lot quicker and load programs quicker using the SSD and a fair amount of storage for projects etc.

Savvy_Sue

elastic wrote: »

I'm paying!

Well, I'd still say stay out of it! make it clear that you'll pay up to £x but that it's his choice, and if it ends up not being adequate he'll be on his own, especially if he didn't listen to his dad! (Ah, sons and dads talking tech ...)