<p>Especially one that costs $2500. Or if you’re really scared, why not hedge your bets and save half the money just in case.</p>
<p>I’m still operating on a Dell Latitude D810 that’s at least three years old, and does everything I need it to just fine. You’re not going to need a beast of a machine for school, especially not $2500 worth. Tell your parents to just give you the money, then buy a $1300 laptop that will easily last you four years. And then use the rest of the money for whatever (pay off loans).</p>
<p>Besides, you really don’t want to be running CAD or analysis programs on your laptop. Trust me, you will get no work done.</p>
<p>“i second looking at the envy’s. envy 14 (june 27th) has some of the best specs i’ve seen on the market and for reasonable price. the envy 17 is another option and i suppose you’d be leaning towards that.”</p>
<p>The Envy 14 looks very cool. Is there any reason to buy up from there to a 17, aside from screen size? And does the bigger screen make it more of a pain to carry?</p>
<p>I think im going to go with the Macbook Pro i7 and just run bootcamp on it when the engineering programs are necessary. Which wont be for a year or two</p>
<p>Seems like you went with the safest option. Good choice =]</p>
<p>Haha yes, it’s a good choice if and only if you can afford it (and you clearly can) – it’s not a cheap computer!</p>
<p>wow it’s like you just skipped over my message or just plain ignored it. The new Envys’s come with an aluminum body and may out perform most macbooks (don’t quote me on this) for a cheaper price.</p>
<p>sorry for double post but in response to beastman, there is a reason why you would want to get the envy 17. with it’s eyefinity(?), you can run up to three external monitors simultaneously so essentially, you’ll have a very, very wide screen in addition to your laptop monitor. but then again, as a college student, you would not have 3 external monitors (or would you). the envy 17, i think, is geared towards the media end of spectrum so they can utilize its full capabilities.</p>
<p>as with all laptops, bigger screen = more weight, so i would not lug that thing all over campus unless i really had to. i believe that the envy 17, while being a laptop, is suppose to be a desktop replacement.</p>
<p>I don’t like hp at all there is no service when something goes wrong</p>
<p>Hmm… I haven’t had any experience with customer support for any computer brand, mostly because any problems that I’ve had have been minor and I’ve been able to fix them myself (and they were usually my fault!). But if you want to be on the safe side, I’m sure Apple support is great.</p>
<p>As I said earlier, Macbook Pros are good choices if you can afford one.</p>
<p>Is there any reason you need 8GB of RAM and an i7 processor? They’re just wastes of money unless you really need them, and if you really need such power, you’re better off with a small form factor desktop.</p>
<p>Truth is, unless you’re encoding videos all day, compiling multiple pieces of software at once, or running intense simulations, the extra RAM and processing power is unlikely to help. Even if you are, you don’t need all that power; the power just makes it nice in the same way that a BMW is nicer than a Hyundai even though both get you from point A to B.</p>
<p>On laptops, the i3 530M will give you very similar performance for most tasks. More RAM will not increase performance significantly unless you don’t have enough. Hard disk space is best solved by significantly cheaper external HDDs.</p>
<p>That said, I suggest you get a Dell Latitude E-series or Lenovo Thinkpad T-series for ~$1000 and leave it at that. It’s likely to last you four years, and in case your requirements are so large as to make it not last four years, you can just spend the next $1000 two years later. Not sure if your parents can subsidize it then? Get a summer job!</p>
<p>“I don’t like hp at all there is no service when something goes wrong”</p>
<p>All computers come with a one year limited warranty, so I’m not sure what you mean by “there is no service when something goes wrong”. But even if that is true, the Envy is the premium line of HP’s laptop, similar to Apple’s Macbook Pro.</p>
<p>My AP Chem teachers husband is an engineer and I was told to get the most powerful you can afford because all the CAD programs take a lot of power and are ram hungry</p>
<p>The Envy 14 will be priced at $1000?? That’s my choice!! I’m no computer geek, but it seems like it has the most Macbook-esque look and feel of any of them, which is unnecessary but nice for my son whose sole computer to this point is a Macbook.</p>
<p>And if the consensus is that Macs are not the ideal choice for engineering - although I see many here favoring them - that also makes it attractive to the Macbook lover.</p>
<p>why is it not okay to get a mac for engineering? can’t you just buy parallels 5 or use boot camp for the pc-only programs? I ask because I want to double in humanities and engineering.</p>
<p>You can use either OS, but it’s just a little more convenient to use Windows.</p>
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<p>That’s true. However, they should still run reasonably well on some lower-end laptops. It’s just that the more powerful you go, the more performance you get.</p>
<p>However, chances are, you won’t actaully be running the CAD programs on your laptop until fairly late into your college career. Then, your department will most likely have computer labs with very expensive systems that do CAD much better than any laptop of any cost.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that CAD doesn’t apply to all engineers – it mainly pretains to Civil, Mechanical, and maybe Nuclear engineering.</p>
<p>Great point, excelblue. One of the things I struggle with is what exactly makes an engineer’s needs so different from anyone else’s, given the fact that their really demanding applications will or could be done in labs on high end equipment. At least that’s my impression. Half of me wants to buy my kid a new performance PC laptop and the other half wants to send him with his 2 year old Macbook!</p>