I am a freshman aerospace engineering major starting in the fall. I am looking into what laptop to get and I was faced with a question. Do I need to worry about getting a laptop that can run CAD software like SolidWorks or can I get by using the computer labs? Thanks.
We are in the same situation ( Aero/physics) and you really should get a laptop. I asked the same question in the Reddit ufl forum and this is a synopsis of what they commented:
1)This is a good baseline from the Engineering college. https://www.eng.ufl.edu/students/resources/computer-requirements/
I would definitely suggest bringing around a laptop with a decent battery life, just to avoid the headache of needing to look for an outlet. You can use a Mac, but you should be willing to use bootcamp and put Windows on it. Aside from that, the more Ram the better, and have an external drive to make backups and store any media you don’t want taking up space on a laptop.
2)If you are going into engineering, I suggest at least a decent amount of processing power, as you could be running things like SolidWorks, Matlab, Quartus, LabView, Pumplinks, etc. I just bought the Surface Pro 3 with an i5, but I chose it over others mostly because I wanted something to take notes on. Seeing as you already have a Nexus 10 to do that, you may want to get something with a little more processing power, but it really isn’t necessary, so you could also save yourself some money.
All engineering labs have outlets, so you should be fine with power, and most lectures don’t require a computer, and therefore there are very few outlets in some lecture halls. Like someone said above, lectures are only an hour long, but labs can vary.
Last year we purchased a laptop with one of the newer i5 chips (4th generation), as the latest generation of i3, i5 and i7 chips have better built-in graphics (and better power consumption). No need to spend a lot of $ on a much more powerful laptop with a dedicated graphics card. If you need that much power, you are going to want to use one of the workstations in the lab.
I’m sorry I wasn’t quite clear on my question. I am going to get a laptop for sure, I just wanted to know if I could get a decent one without trying to get an amazing one to try to run CAD software on. I found a pretty good deal on a dell inspiron with 12gb of RAM and an i5 processor that I think I am going to get. Thanks gator88ne!