<p>I'm going to be a freshman mechanical engineering major at UCLA this fall, although I may change my major to computer science. I'm just wondering if engineering majors require or more powerful computer or anything special like that or if I can just get the same kinda of laptops everybody else gets.</p>
<p>anything you want. Even the slowest is now faster than what was very good just 4 years ago which was adequate then and now. Cheaper, better screen, easier connectivities. Use the faster computer inside your skull rather than the external computer that relies on your fingers to make the input.</p>
<p>Get yourself a nice computer, especially if you’re going to be doing CS, but you don’t need to go over the top. If computing power becomes an issue, the school will have facilities to handle that (and if not, no laptop you can buy is going to help).</p>
<p>i have a dell xps 1330. i think it got replaced by a 13" studio xps, but i recommend it highly. it’s powerful enough to do anything i want (i dont game, so that might make a difference), and it weighs like 4.5 pounds, pretty much the same weight as a small/med-sized school book. and the battery life is long enough to get through about 3-4 hours of class w/ wifi on.</p>
<p>you can get the same laptop or worse than everyone else IF you do not play vid games, and will not do 3d rendering on your laptop…ie using the schools desktop. I bought a laptop that enabled me to play games and do 3d rendering low to mid without having to change anything. I can overclock or put in a quad core or a workstation gpu to make it legit when i have money later on. it depends n what you want to do with it. I will underclock and under volt my gpu and cpu to get max batt life when im off the plug.</p>
<p>I have a Dell Studio 17 and it has been able to handle everything I’ve thrown at it including game on it (granted I upgraded a few of the specs but I can’t remember what. It was only an extra $100 or so).</p>
<p>Get a laptop or tablet PC for school related thing. If you can afford (and care) about a better video card, you can look into it but you won’t need it for school. Get at least 2GB of memory.</p>
<p>You won’t need something faster until the later part of your junior year.</p>