Parents dilemma - Laptops for Physics Major Freshman?
Hi, Is there a certain laptop we should purchase for son who is attending in the fall? He will be a physics major with Astrophysics goal. He is not a big fan of apple. He want to go for intel i7 + NVIDIA graphics card. I find there are theft risk at colleges for laptops/electronics. I am concerned of bringing high end laptop with strong graphic card into the mix may distract from academics and glue to video gaming. It may attract others envy as well
Is he on right direction?
How do we protect from theft?
How do we make sure, he uses the Laptop for academics not for video gaming/distractions?
It seems unlikely that a college frosh doing academic work will need a high end computer. (This includes computer science majors doing their programming assignments on their own computers.)
Usually, there’s an IT page on the college website with recommendations about the power needed, network security packages they recommend or demand, etc. Or the various depts within STEM will make statements fr their majors. Most laptop threads go gaga over high end but I tend to agree with what ucb wrote. If he gets to the point where he’s dealing with super intense processing, there are often computer work stations on campus that run those off the school computer. Snoop around, see what the college says.
The request for an nvidia graphics card raises a red flag as that’s usually for gaming. There are some legit requirements for cad/cam and such, but I doubt a freshman will be needing it.
Check the university’s website to see if they recommend anything in particular. I know some schools have recommended configurations. Even MIT’s configs don’t include discrete graphics cards, nor do Duke’s. Most likely a lightweight but less powerful laptop will get more (and more appropriate) use since it’ll be easier to carry around and will have longer battery life.
For theft, I recommend two things. First, register the new laptop with carbonite for automatic backups. Second, call your insurance company and ask to have the laptop covered; it should be a small fee, maybe $100/yr or less.
Video game play is quite normal these days. Has this been a negative in the past? If not, then you’re fighting an uphill battle. My DD is a CompSci major – but loves her games too. Frankly it’s one part of who she is – but she’s also in the Honors College and on a nationally competitive athletic team.
My advice would be unless you’ve seen red flags previously, monitor but don’t prohibit game play.
I worried about getting a specific laptop for my engineering daughter (she hadn’t decided on a major) and in the end she was told that just about anything would work (although many people had recommended not to get a Mac). She ended up with just a basic laptop with a little more power than I would need (or her sister wanted or needed ) and it’s been fine. The school said anything that wouldn’t run on her computer could be done on the university’s computers, but she hasn’t even needed that yet.
She is not a gamer and doesn’t even use it that much for TV or movies.
This is very YMMV. One risk of making such an assumption as my engineering relatives made when advising on my first college laptop is that if the machine’s too low-end, the machine can become rapidly obsolete. Another factor of assuming a budget-line laptop line is the build quality may be lacking.
I experienced both those factors during my first 2 years of undergrad in the following:
LCD screen died right after the 1 year warranty ran out at end of frosh year. In retrospect, considering the cost of repair, I'd have been much better off getting a higher-end corporate line laptop...but didn't know any better at the time.
Couldn't use some software I needed for some CS classes because the machine was too slow and lacking in system resources freshman and sophomore year.
Hard drive died at end of sophomore year. At that point, the machine was so obsolete and prior repair cost was such it wasn't worth sinking any more money into that lemon*. Used my summer job earnings to purchase a corporate line laptop at a discount from the firm I worked that summer. That laptop lasted me several years after graduation until professional needs necessitated a laptop upgrade.
One lesson I learned other than it’s better to learn and repair one’s computers oneself is to be wary of relatives…including engineers/techies underestimating one’s technical needs…especially if one plans on using the same laptop for one’s entire undergrad career.
Unless one plans on buying another laptop during undergrad like I found I had to do, one must anticipate “futureproofing” needs…especially if one is majoring in or even planning to take classes requiring computationally demanding software like CS, engineering, multimedia processing related fields like film, etc.
Even though I can replace the hard drive now, the design of that notebook is such it makes repair a hassle even for experienced IT/IS professionals like yours truly and even less worth it considering the processor/resources are such they were already obsolete when I got it in the mid-'90s.
You might consider finding out what most students in the major are using. It can vary quite a bit from school to school. At Penn most of the CS and engineering students use Macs. Not as good for gaming, but all Macs have Unix on them which is convenient.
DS is a CS/Math major at Yale, but I think it applies elsewhere.
Compute intensive processing takes place on the cloud, not locally. He has a Mac, but a Windows-based PC would be fine also. His Mac was originally high-end, but it is 4 years old iirc. He is pathologically frugal; swears he doesn’t need a new one. He games, but seldom; it’s a good way to unwind for him.
I recommend CrashPlan rather than Carbonite for backups. It supports versioning, which Carbonite doesn’t. Roughly equal in cost.
I also recommend getting college student insurance; cost for $5000 coverage with a reasonable deductible will be around $130 per year.
An i7 processor is not as rare & high end as it might seem, and for physics/astro, an i5 is probably the baseline (unless you are planning to get a new laptop within two years). Our physics collegekid (Junior) just had a near-death experience with her beloved Asus a couple of months ago, so we did a thorough piece of research on what’s out there that would fit her needs. She really seriously did not want a new laptop, so was a very reluctant shopper. She ruled out Macs (saying that not all of the software that she uses for academics is Mac friendly), and an i3 processor (not up to the level of computation/modeling she had been doing that year.). In many cases the price jump to i7 was not that great, and if she was going to have the laptop for (say) 4 years, it made sense to go for the i7. Happily for all of us, her laptop was repairable- new motherboard.
As for gaming: the vast majority of her physics/astro/comp sci friends do some amount of gaming, but as a group they are all very high achievers academically.
More importantly, like it or not, you can’t make sure that he uses the laptop only for academics, not video gaming/distractions (Netflix binging is also a thing, and you can’t stop that either). You just can’t. You can’t even monitor gameplay (sorry, @T26E4). You also can’t check that he has turned in his homework, or to see what his grades are. Welcome to the wonderful world of writing the check but having no control.
You can’t really protect from theft (or loss, for that matter, which is just as likely) but highly visible and hard-to-remove decorations on the outside can make it less attractive to the average thief, and insurance coverage can take the sting out of it if it does get stolen. As for envy- nobody can tell from the outside what a laptop has on the inside- and the vast majority of students have laptops. Unless you buy a special edition, a black Lenovo looks like a black Lenovo.
Take the recommendations on the school’s IT page seriously. You want a machine that will be good for all four years, so buy the most memory and the fastest processor you can afford. My son is a gamer who has taken some CS classes, so we got him an Alienware laptop . I forget the specs, but he expects it to be good for the rest of his college years.
We bought a laptop cable to secure it, but he has never felt the need to use it because laptop theft is rare at his school. Bike theft is a different story…
But how long ago was this? Exponential growth of compute power, memory, and disk space means that obsolescence in terms of being too slow for the task is much less of a concern now than some years ago.
Quality and durability does not always match up with compute power, memory, and disk space.
Yes, backing up the data is important, regardless of what kind of computer it is.
Things have changed a LOT since the 1990’s @cobrat. Even some of the lowest end computers from Big Box stores will work well even for engineering majors. You don’t need to get the highest end laptop to use as a college student.
In regards to the worry about envy from having a high end computer, in my experience most college students use Macs. Doesn’t matter how nice of a Windows machine he’s got, if it’s running Windows they’ll look down on it anyway.
There’s no way you can ensure he uses it solely for academics and not gaming/entertainment. No matter what you try to install on there, he will find a way around it. I guarantee it. Don’t waste your time. If you think it’ll be a problem, talk to him about it, but also keep in mind that time not spent studying =/= time wasted.