What is a good laptop for ece engineering student?

Laptop Choice for Engineering/Information Technology student?

• Laptop Choice for Engineering/Information Technology student? Laptop Choice for Engineering/Information Technology student? Hi, I am starting my Bachelor of Engineering(Electronic and Computer Engineering)/Bachelor of IT, this year at Griffith. I would like to know whether or not I should buy a mac. My friend who is studying the environment this year just bought a macbook pro a few days ago and showed it to me, it look pretty nice. And I like the instant on feature as I saw him open the lid and everything he was doing just came up immediately. I am quite knowledgeable with computers so dont be afraid to use all the computer terms in your response. My budget is reasonably high, as I was thinking of also buying the 15" i7 Macbook pro. At the same time however I am not really sure whether I should just stick to windows as I am used to it, and I know we will be using Autocad and probably some programming software and other engineering software. This is one of the reasons I am hesitant about a mac, I know you can use parallels or Vmware but apparently they do not run very fast and with such intensive modelling and mathematics programs the computer might not handle it. I also want the laptop to be pretty light and thing, a macbook pro is a great size. I know I can also use bootcamp to boot into windows although that mean I will need to use up more space on the small 128gb hard drive to create a partition for windows. So if I were to go with a windows computer I would probably get an ultrabook. considering normal windows laptops are often quite think and heavy. The ultrabook I have been looking at is the i5 13" Zenbook.

• Answer:

  Personally, I would go for a Windows 7 based laptop like the Dell Inspiron series. My brother uses it for his civil engineering studies and the fact is, you'll need a Windows OS system to natively install and run several of the engineering programs. For open source, even a UNIX (Linux) based system will do the job. So bottom line is, stick with laptops like Dell or Toshiba that run Windows or Linux.