Recommendations from ENG-CS for students wanting to purchase a Computer.

Trying to purchase a computer, laptop or tablet is an area that is constantly changing. Many times a specific retail configuration is out of date a month after you purchase it. The systems that we recommend are models from manufacturers that have proven track records and most have components that are typically not  Beta or test items, rather they have components that are continually included in system configurations because they are established.

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Most of our public labs are PC systems with 156 seats, and we have a 30 seat MAC lab. All of these are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for use as teaching facilities and free use computer labs for you to do their research and/or assignments.  Now that you have some idea of how our computer labs are set up, let us offer some recommendations outside of what your individual college department may suggest. We are providing a recommendation for both workstations, (either a desktop or mid-tower, which would be kept and used in their room)   and laptops which offer portability and will allow you to take the system to class and the library, etc.

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LAPTOPS:

•  In a PC Laptop  configuration, consider the mobility of the unit and the care you will exhibit for that unit. We tend to recommend either Lenovo (used to be IBM)  or DELL, with similar configurations to the full systems, however because of their size the laptop may not be able to contain everything expected like a DVD drive. Since the ultra slim models are so thin and lightweight, these components are left off the laptop and it is up to you to purchase something of a docking station that may include them. However, a Core i-7 processor over a Core i-5 and as much RAM memory as you can afford. RAM is the horsepower to your processor and the video output shares in this RAM.

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