Hey guys I'm heading out to university in a week and I need some advice on which laptop I should get. I am enrolled in a bunch of computer science courses, as well as as much math I can get, I also might get into 3D modelling, I took a geography type landscaping programming course which should be interesting. I am also bringing my desktop so this laptop shouldnt require to run games smoothely, it's just solely for programming. I have a couple laptops in mind but I would love your opinion, thanks!!

You should post here: http://forums.d2jsp.org/forum.php?f=189

Fill out the "laptop" section of post two in this sticky: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=56436747&f=189 and try to list the names of the programs you will most commonly be using as we'll.

You can program comfortably with just about any laptop on the market today, if it's for class you'll want a long battery life, but I would stray from mac, install IOS only if it's required for your course as a secondary OS.

3D modeling is a bit different, for that you'll want processing power and a bit of graphics power, dx11.

I suggest:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834257178

If money isn't an issue, look at this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834257347

And if money is really not an issue at all I suggest a high-end workstation from Lenovo.

Note: You'll need to have windows 7 for your courses more than likely.

my advice to you: you may get by without an extra keyboard, but for the love of all that's holy, buy yourself a usb mouse.

vouch (clicked with my optical usb mouse)

I'd recommend getting a SSD if you can afford it. It makes a huge difference cus IDEs take forever to load up without one.

I actually preferred having a 12" Powerbook (today's equivalent would be a Macbook Air) for when I was in college actually. There are a lot of really powerful and free programming tools on the Mac (no need to dick around with Cygwin on a Windows box), and generally better native support for plugging in with 'nix networks than a Windows machine. So many great programming tools just work natively out of the box on the Mac (I never got used to writing Python on Windows, honestly).

I found that the perfect combo for college was Windows Desktop + Mac laptop + 'nix workstations scattered throghout the campus.

This post was edited by irimi on Aug 26 2013 03:41pm