Buying laptop for computer science student

In this guide, we tell you what the minimum requirements are for choosing the best student notebook, also depending on the curriculum you intend to undertake.
2022-10-01, by ,

#CS Students || #Laptop || #Buying guide ||

Features to look for when buying the best laptop for computer science students

RAM

Random access memory, or RAM, is what helps your computer run multiple programmes simultaneously without slowing down. The more RAM your computer has, the better its performance will be. We recommend at least 16 GB of RAM for computer science graduates. Some high-end laptops will have up to 32 GB!

Storage

All the data you collect needs somewhere to live! When choosing a laptop for computer science students, make sure you get one with plenty of storage space.

You should look for at least 256 GB of storage space. If you're a computer scientist who has a serious data-gathering habit, 256 GB may not be enough and we recommend you also get an external hard drive (with access to the cloud).

Tablet vs Laptop

I would recommend the laptop. First of all, because with the laptop you can do everything you would like to do on the desktop. Follow lectures online? Download and solve pdfs of exam topics? Programming (given the faculty indicated in the application)? These are things that you can easily do on the desktop, and therefore also on the laptop, of course. Possibly only a few milliseconds slower, but it doesn't matter. If, on the other hand, the problem is the inconvenience of the small screen, you can always connect an external one, even if it's old (as I did, just get the vga to hdmi adapter).

Then the laptop because it is irreplaceable for certain other situations. Do you want to take your computer to lab? Do you want to be with your mates doing programming competitions? Do you want to use it to take notes? Do you want to do exercises in uni with your friends and therefore need a computer to consult documents from? Do you want to bring it to the homework viewing to show the teacher that your code works? You could never do all that with a desktop.

Examples of CS topics

Encodings are UTF-8, Windows-1251, ASCII, etc. Many programmers are plagued by various encoding problems. Therefore, knowing this at least on a basic level will make your life a lot easier.

Programming paradigms. What is object-oriented, functional and logical programming. How they differ, their advantages and disadvantages. This will help you choose the most appropriate tool and approach to solve your problem as efficiently as possible. Because language and technology are, first of all, just tools that you must be able to intelligently choose for your task.

Programming techniques and methods. It is worth familiarizing yourself with the concept of recursion, memoization, dynamic, linear programming and the like. Also understand what, where and when (Insert What, Where, When) is better to be applied. It will help you to make your code much more efficient and of higher quality.

Computer architecture. At least roughly understand what memory is in a computer, why it is needed, which one is faster, etc. Why copying an object 1000 times is not the best idea, why do you need to cache information, etc. It is also a good idea to understand the specifics of calculations by processor, video card. How to manage software resources wisely. In general, it is useful to know how and what works in that box under the table.

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