Hi, I will be a freshman engineering student at Notre Dame next year (woot). Now I’ve looked into recommended laptop specs, and ND recommends a minimum of an i5 processor; I have an AMD A6 Dell laptop at home that can be upgraded to 8 gb of RAM. If there are any incoming freshman or current ND students out there, do you think an A6 with 8 GB RAM will do the job for the engineering program? I’ve run Eclipse for java this year on my laptop and have not had any problems, but I know there are more intensive engineering programs I’d have to run eventually. Also, for you current ND students, how often do you use the labs compared to your laptop for engineering programs/projects? Thanks in advance!
Freshman year, regardless of major, there really isn’t anything you need a powerful laptop for. I wouldn’t be too worried about getting a laptop right now, you should be fine.
Start with your existing machine. If you need to upgrade, you can have a new machine delivered in a day or 2. There are computer laps that you can use to avoid any down time.
I was an engineering major first semester, so I can try to help you out at least a bit. I would definitely start with your existing computer, as I think the recommendations are definitely overkill. The programs you have to run during the first semester are PTC Creo (Windows only - regardless of what it says on the ND website about all programs being on both) and LabVIEW. Both of these should run fine on your A6. The second semester is almost entirely in MATLAB - not sure how your experience will be there, but I’m guessing fine based off of how my roommates managed.
All of the computers in Stinson-Remick (engineering building) have the software that you will need already on it. A decent amount of people use these computers, and the room that they hold office hours for Intro to Engineering is where most of these computers are located.
So yeah, you should definitely be fine with your current computer for the time being. I would wait.