<p>Does the BMED engineering department recommend a particular personal computer for students?</p>
<p>We asked this question during our tour of Engineering and were told it doesn't matter no matter what dept. you're in.</p>
<p>I found this in the ME dept - not sure how current it is:</p>
<p>What</a> Computer Do I Need? - - Mechanical Engineering - Cal Poly</p>
<p>Good question Remedie. Im a bmeder too =]</p>
<p>from what I've heard, PCs are recommended over Macs, over the fact that some engineering software does not run on Macs. I was kinda disappointed to hear this because I wanted a macbook =/</p>
<p>The new Macs are Intel based and can run MS OSs or even Linux for that matter just fine which means, theoretically at least, that you should be able to install and run the engineering software. Probably the best approach is to partition the hard drive and install each OS.</p>
<p>Question: do the depts post the software students are expected to purchase/use?</p>
<p>FWIW, we were advised to hold off on buying a computer and were rather surprised when a number of students said they rarely used theirs other than for recreation.</p>
<p>gotpeter, the problem with that is many people don't know how to dual boot or partition a hard-drive. </p>
<p>and ya, thats what I've heard also. That most students use the computers at cal poly to do their school work.</p>
<p>But, these are our future engineers! :)</p>
<p>Then again, there's also the cost of the additional OS. Duality is kinda cool though.</p>
<p>Well, the local Linux users group puts on an event at the start of each quarter called "free your machine" where unix gurus install on people's PCs. It's very helpful to have a Linux install around if you are living in University Housing, due to the folks known as "ResNet" and their "Cisco Clean Access".</p>
<p>If you are Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Software Engineering, it's also very helpful, since nearly all of the computer science department run Linux (even all of our workstations in the labs). It's very helpful to use the same environment and compiler tools that your professor (or his/her grading scripts) will use to grade you.</p>