“My D’s school is recommending the Dell Latitude E7490”
Do they say why they recommend a Latitude? Those are Dell’s business laptops with management features for corporate use. You find them under the “For Work” path at Dell.
An Inspiron, the consumer line, which is what I bought my D, of the same specs, with 4 years Premium Support plus Accidental Damage coverage, is $300 cheaper. And I didn’t even look at her school’s discount program, which saved me a couple hundred when I purchased.
I’d highly recommend a Windows machine vs. buying a Mac and then trying to make Windows-only software think it’s a Windows machine with emulation software.
@boneh3ad, that’s why being a professor at Brown or Stanford would be so easy. Everyone gets As.
@Aeg203, my suspicion as to why schools recommend specific computer models is that they are getting kickbacks from the company. I’m always leery when they recommend a single model because there are so many equivalent models that it makes no sense.
At my son’s school (Cal Poly) they get discounts on Apple, HP and Dell, but they do not recommend specific machines for MEs. Here is what they say, and I think it is solid advice.
“When you’re down to deciding between two similar computers, go for the one with more memory as opposed to a faster processor. For example, a 3 GHz computer with 16Gb ram would be better than a 3.3 GHz computer with 8 Gb ram (8 Gb ram is the minimum and 16Gb is recommended.) We suggest the newest Quad Core and Solid State Drives (SSD).”
@eyemgh Thank you very much for that advice! It really clears things up. It helps to know how to prioritize the configuration. It was confusing why Syracuse would recommend the same computer across the board but now it makes sense, all comes down to the dollar.
