Is laptop a must-have item to study in the program?

[Yuriy]

Any other disadvantages of Dell besides that it is a couple of grams heavier?
It is fine with me that it is heavier if I can save a couple of hundred dollars

 

[bob]

My $0.02 on matters discussed in this thread:
(1)Buy a laptop.
Get something reasonably fast, equipped with Office and an IDE that does C++. I've found that a simple but reasonably flexible graphing calculator application (one comes bundled with Mac OSX, don't know about Windows) can come in handy at times also.

There's just so much coding in the program, or Excel work at a minimum, and you'll want to be able to carry it with you easily. While you're at it, get an external hard drive and make regular backups.

(2)Don't buy a Dell.
Made this mistake once in buying a laptop for my wife (then fiancee); thankfully, she consented to marry me anyway. It was too little machine for the OS they shipped it with, and when I tried to upgrade, I discovered they had taken up both memory ports with the smallest SIMMs they could find, so I had to buy two new chunks of memory, not just one, and throw the old ones away. If you must go this direction, be very careful about what you're buying.

My wife's next laptop after the Dell was a teeny-tiny Sony Vaio that she likes as much as anyone can like a machine whose OS was written by Microsoft.

(3)Don't dismiss Macs.
For some reason they've been passe in scientific computing circles, but I've been an Apple guy since my family got a II+ in 19 something-something. They rule. The OS is UNIX-based, and it's written by the same company that makes the hardware, so they're orders of magnitude more stable than PC's. I confess to liking the fact that the OS is simpler; with far fewer tweaking options available, it's possible to actually find what you want in short order. Anyone who's ever installed a new piece of hardware on both a PC and a Mac is just downright deluded if they deny that the overall execution of Mac OS is better.

Macs come with a free full-featured downloadable IDE that does C++, Java, and Python. They use the public-domain GCC compiler for C++, so the code you generate is quite portable. Thanks to their (distant) second market position, they're virtually virus-free and have been forced all along to communicate quite well with PCs. The support you get, if you do have a problem, is absolutely unparalleled. The one time I did have a problem with my current Mac (some bad third-party memory), I made an appointment at the Genius Bar down in SoHo and got free support that saved all the material on my hard drive. (At that point, I needed another Mac to be able to pull the material off my hard drive, so obviously phone support would not have done the trick.) I still sort of can't believe they didn't charge me for it.

At the top of my to-do list once I have a full-time job is to pick up one of the new Intel-based Macs with Boot Camp. I'm really looking forward to the day when Macs run Windows-based applications faster than PCs do.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Any other disadvantages of Dell besides that it is a couple of grams heavier?
It is fine with me that it is heavier if I can save a couple of hundred dollars

Where do we start with Dell ? A simple "Dell s****" google will yield countless stories on that.
It's ironic that Nalin is the person who discourages people from buying Dell. When he asked me for advice on laptop to buy last year, I told him not to buy Dell. I said to buy a Thinkpad instead.
I'm sure the affordability of Dell has everything to do with his final decision

I had Dell, Compaq, Thinkpaq laptops and of the three, IBM is the most durable and lightest. IBM is more expensive to start with but it's built for business audience. Dell is the cheapest but it built for cost-concious crowd.
I took my laptop to school everyday and it was a terrible experience with Dell. It's really heavy. It's not grams heavier but pounds heavier. When you carry it days in and out, it makes a HUGE difference.

I was so glad it broke after 1 year. The LCD connector got loose, then the LCD die, etc...many problems with Dell. Oh, it got so hot too :D

 

[alain]

Dell is not a bad company as long as you buy the right Dell Laptop. Dell sells two lines of laptops. The crappy one that most people buy "Inspiron" and the good one that most business buy "Latitude". If for any reason you need to buy a dell, buy a Latitude and you won't be disappointed but be ready to fork out some cash. They are not cheap.

I'm very close to jump to the dark side and buy a Mac. Woody has me almost convinced to get one. There are couple of things I don't like about them but those are personal preference.

My recommendation is very simple. If you need to buy a Windows laptop, buy a ThinkPad. They are workhorses. If you have the money and don't want to carry the weight around, buy a Panasonic Toubhbook CF-Y5. These things are really light (3.7lbs), reasonably powerful, and have some other benefits: kind of drop resistant and water resistant among other things... however, they will put back $2000+

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I'm very close to jump to the dark side and buy a Mac. Woody has me almost convinced to get one. There are couple of things I don't like about them but those are personal preference.

While you are at it, you may as well get a pink iPod, iPhone and iTivi. :D
Seriously, what happened to you, Alain ?

If you want to get a Mac just to use the operating system, I'm sure you didn't know about OSx86 project.
OSx86 Project | InsanelyMac

People have been running Mac OS on PC for awhile now. With Apple going to replace their PowerPC hardware with Intel-based, it doesn't make sense to get a new Mac just to use the OS.

Install Ubuntu or OSx86 and you have everything you want.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I'm very close to jump to the dark side and buy a Mac. Woody has me almost convinced to get one. There are couple of things I don't like about them but those are personal preference.

Alain,
Here are some writing by a guy who is a Sony user, bought a Mac and live to tell his story. I think it may be of some use to you.

All,

I have been following the Mac with Windows vs a IBM PC for some time, and I fell I can offer my views as I have expericened at first hand the mac vs PC debate.

After owning a Sony Vaio for 6 years and being very happy with it, it started to get cranky and the hard disk was very noisy. Not wanting to a risk a rebuild and leaving myself without a PC (I'm working abroad) I decided to look around for options. I had kept looking at Macs, and was persuded by the perceived quality and the build quality. Once the Intel Macs were able to boot into Windows XP, I was convinced and purchased a black Core 2 Duo Macbook with 2GB Ram and had XP loaded using bootcamp.

At first all was well, loved the quality of the webcam (Skype sessions back home were excellent, but hated the lack of right mosue click, the lack of dedicated delete / backspace keys (only one or the other) and frankly hated the feel of the keyboard, which I never got used to.

Once I had it, it developed a fault where if powered down, on power up the backlight would be off. Try navigating to the control panel without the backilight. After numerous power resets and hardware resets it may start working again, but after a power down, the whole thing would start again. After it let me down on 3 Asia and UK trips, I cried enough, and whilst in UK, brought a Z61T.

What a difference! Excellent keyboard, card reader, reasonable webcam, superb build quality. I love this machine.

In fact I love it so much, I went out and brought a X60 as well for travelling! (Just wish it had a webcam built in)

SO, in summary I realise now I am a Windows guy, and the Mac maybe a great OSX machine, but in my opinion it's a lousy PC.

(PS - rebuilt the Sony, which is now great again, so I could have avoided the whole pain! - But very happy to be a Thinkpad convert)