Hello, I will be studying Mechanical Engineering in January 2016;And I will be starting my classes at this time as a freshmen. I am having an issue and please, need help fast. I have been researching laptops and looking for the one that will best help me with my studies. I have been asking to see what laptops are good for studying Mechanical/Chemical Engineering. I would like some students or even professors whom are teaching or have graduated; what laptops do you recommend and why? If you do not mind. And if you would be put your top 3 recommended too, thanks! Please help me know what programs I will use and what the schools have to offer me. I plan to also minor in Business. Thank you and have a great day!
P.S. My top choice is the Apple MacBook Pro 13in with Retina Display ATM
You do not want a Macbook. ME majors do a lot of SolidWorks/CAD and that program runs better on a PC. Look at your college’s laptop requirements. If your college doesn’t have one then look at a college like Purdue or Georgia Tech. Lenovos are good. You want one with a lot of power and memory. It takes a lot to do the ME programs. My D has a lenovo and I refer to it as a brick but it works great for what she needs to do in ME. I think I spent about $ 1300 on it. I contacted Lenovo and told them what I needed it to do and they built it. They offer educational discounts
Any machine can do the entry stuff. The problem with the $1300 Lenovo or any $1300 machine is that it isn’t good enough to do heavy CAD lifting, but it’s still heavy and expensive. Setting aside the fact that CAD is more satisfying on a desktop due to the value for performance, it can be done and is done even professionally on a laptop, but they need specs way more advanced than you’ll find for $1300. For example, my son’s machine has a quad core i7, quadro 2200, 32g RAM and a 1T SSD. He’s done AutoCAD for an engineering firm and Solidworks at school, but it wasn’t $1300. He loves his @Xi, but for the same money he paid he could have had a faster desktop AND a suitible daily driver laptop.
AutoCAD requires considerably less power than something like SolidWorks or Creo (formerly Pro/E). And while you say it is done on a laptop professionally, I assure you this is the vast minority of cases.
I agree 100%. I’m not advocating a true CAD capable laptop, even though they do exist. I’m just saying IF you want a laptop that can really do Solidworks and is Solidworks certified, it’s gotta be burlier than most students want to budget for, certainly more than the $1300 Lenovo.
A true CAD laptop is in the $2500+ range. Just bought one for my graduate architecture student daughter this past July. Core i7, 2TB drives, 32gb, nVidia K4000… But it’s the size of a mattress… With a serious graphic card (discrete graphics) you should be OK. My daughter used a Lenovo Thinkpad 420 with discrete graphics for 4 years for undergrad Architecture and OK, it got slow at the end and you won’t render the Burj anytime soon on it but for CAD a basic discrete graphics and core i7 should be fine. Don’t get anything more than 14" tho but get a good display, not the pitiful ones.
You mean Windows 10? Of course it’s not needed, but it’s a free upgrade from older Windows so why not upgrade anyway? It’s pretty nice. If your question was more about Windows in general versus a Mac, then just take your pick. More software with run smoothly on Windows but these days plenty of people use Macs, too.
Actually, Windows 8.1 was pretty nice assuming you could or were willing to stop relying on the clunky start menu (I preferred it to 7) and Windows 10 is pretty spectacular. Both run much faster and with lower overhead than 7 and have a lot of cool features added.
Starting with Windows 10 (there is no Windows 11), Microsoft no longer does updates with service packs (or at least they claim they aren’t). They’ve just been pushing updates behind the scenes in a much more rapid and incremental rate.
It’s sort of like Linux where kernel updates and other performance and reliability tweaks are just rolled out as they become available and stable rather than all at once every year or two (the difference being its automatic in Windows 10, manual in Linux).
Are they going to force users to accept the automatic updates? Right now on my Win7 system I choose to update when I want to, not automatically. I’ve had updates that have gone wrong and ended up hanging up the system in a endless loop during startup. And also the occasional updates that were bad and Microsoft had to cancel them after problems were identified by users.
Consumer branch updates are automatic. I’m not sure what they’ve done behind the scenes to avoid the issues you’ve cited, which are rare but have happened in the past. I’ve not noticed any issues so far, but it’s only been like 3 or 4 months. Businesses can get onto a slower update track, I know, where they get chunks of non-critical updates like every 3 months.
I know their current model is designed such that updates are cumulative and build on the prior builds, so picking and choosing not generally doesn’t make sense. I have to assume this goes hand in hand with some sort of improved/changed quality control and testing measures before pushing an update out. On the other hand, the cumulative nature ensures that all Windows 10 machines should have the same basic software running so the odds of an update breaking some users machine are far more slim than allowing users to pick and choose.
It is Microsoft, though, so who knows if they’ve actually learned their lesson. So far it’s been a very smooth and painless process and definitely is a more modern approach to an operating system than before. I suppose we won’t know until probably this time next year if the quality control has been improved for certain.
First check out what, if any, recommendations your school(s) of choice are recommending. Most won’t recommend a specific brand or model but will provide some guidance. In most cases, you won’t need an expensive PC.
I had two kids graduate with their BS in mechanical engineering.
I bought my oldest an moderately expensive laptop thinking that it was the best option. It wasn’t. It wasn’t that big but bulky enough that it never left his room. He then got a larger monitor to use with it, then a keyboard and mouse, then an external hard drive for more storage. Then it broke down and he got a tower to replace it!!!
Just went ahead and bought a desktop machine for my second. She used it for a while then got a real thin, light weight Lenovo laptop. She used it primarily for MS office type work, so it did leave her room. She did a lot of group projects where they would collaborate on the report and it traveled with her. The school had labs where she would do her CAD projects on the school computers which is how just about everybody did it she said. Her desktop didn’t go to waste, she used it as her TV video recorder!!!
So, I was zero for two choosing the right PC.
You might think about how you work. Do you like to work in groups (which I would recommend) or more by yourself? Is your school project based, meaning a lot more collaboration for which a laptop that could go anywhere would be useful?
He loves his 