PC or Mac for Aerospace Engineering?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>Hi guys. I will be attending Cal Poly SLO for aero and I'm looking to get a new laptop. Currently I am using my family's 13" 4gb ram 2011 Macbook Pro with 500gb hard drive. </p>

<p>What caught my eye was the Samsung ATIV Book 7 with 4gb ram. I love the ultrabook look and it's super light. I would get it but I'm worried about it's memory. It only has a 128gb SSD. I'm thinking about storing school documents and whatnot in the SSD and using an external hard drive for my entertainment as well as a backup for my files.</p>

<p>Another option for me is getting a new macbook pro like the one I have now which will be good since i'm more used to a mac. But will it be good for engineering? How often do you think I will use windows specific programs and how much memory would they take up? I know i can run it on parallels but i've heard there might be performance issues with PC only programs not to mention I will also have to buy a copy of windows 7. If I get the Samsung will a 128gb SSD + 320gb external hard drive be enough memory?</p>

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<p>Get whichever you are more comfortable with.</p>

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<p>Personally, I’d go with a PC - you get more bang for your buck. And if you’re looking at aerospace engineering, it might be more important to go for a more powerful machine over the lightness of the ultrabook.
A couple of things about SSDs - they have a limited number of read/write cycles, meaning they will wear out quicker, so make sure you keep a good backup! Also, although they are much faster for reading data, they are actually slower for writing. If you are running a lot of computations with data, it’s probably better to do this off of a hard drive.</p>