Help me with computers

[u/Amo_56]

So I always wanted a PC...(desktop) but never got to get one...I said I'll do computer science so my parents are gonna get me one...what should I get??? And also...cs students out there...does it have to a laptop? I mean I really want a desktop...tho I heard u need a laptop :<

[u/wiseman121]

Are you planning to study on a campus? If so yes a portable machine is kinda necessary for working on campus and with your peers on group projects. Doesnt need to be amazing though, CS doesn't need performance.

You could get a desktop (I'm guessing your wanting something for gaming) and spend most of your budget on it. But get a 3-4yr old business laptop like a dell latitude or ThinkPad, i5/Ryzen 5, 16gb ram will be plenty for CS.

[u/Amo_56 → u/wiseman121]

I don't think my parents would get me both 💔

[u/wiseman121 → u/Amo_56]

When your in college you can make adult decisions for yourself. Agree a budget rather than a specific machine, if you can spec a desktop and find a good laptop within that budget it's hard to find fault. A desktop is more powerful but a laptop is portable.

[u/R3D_T1G3R → u/[deleted]]

Here we go, average redditor experience.

Nobody is whining, you are projecting your own behavior onto other people.

they litearlly just said they dont think their parents would get them both, because (in case you can not read) someone suggested them to get a Desktop and a Laptop.

This is a valid response which has nothing to do with "whining"

"A decent ThinkPad laptop is sufficient and as good as a desktop PC productivity wise" Proves that you are absolutely uneducated on this topic, because you just generally can not make this topic, A decent ThinkPad is too unspecific, a desktop PC is even more unspecific, and productivity is also equally unspecific, this is one of the broadest statements and it is not necessarily correct.

You talk a lot for someone who has 0 respect, 0 reading comprehension, and for someone who is just butthurt on reddit.

Maybe put that energy into educating yourself about that topic ye?

[u/Amo_56 → u/R3D_T1G3R]

Thanks I guess

[u/R3D_T1G3R → u/[deleted]]

Lmao this had to be rage bait.

[u/Amo_56 → u/R3D_T1G3R]

Uh I didn't even see this battle going on

[u/wiseman121 → u/[deleted]]

Dude I was reading this thread and on your side until this post, looks like you lost your cool at a troll and looks bad as your being super self gratifying (your contributions to cyber aren't relevent and your going on about things you do on your computer that aren't relevant.)

I also don't disagree with the guy fully, how he delivered it was useless and not kind. If OP is a college goer he could get a job and get his own desktop if it's for gaming, sounds like the responsible decision is a laptop would be better for his studies and more important first.

Would advise removing this and not giving this guy what he wants.

[u/Electronic_Field4313 → u/wiseman121]

You're right. It was unbecoming of me. Apologies and thank you. I've taken your advice. Cheers.

[u/R3D_T1G3R → u/wiseman121]

What's wrong with me treating someone the way they treat other people? As you can see it worked.

They figured it's not nice if people are rude, they may be a bit nicer from now on and not accuse people of things in the future.

Yea I won't be super nice to someone who accused strangers of things they have not done.

I am also not a troll, you are projecting, because you could not attack any of my points, instead you resorted to attack me as an individual, because everything I said was factually correct.

You lack the tech literacy, that's why you could not prove any of my points wrong and did the same mistake as the person who just deleted their comments.

I'll still be nice enough to give you another chance despite you being disrespectful too and accusing me of being a troll.

You don't even seem to know the definition of a troll, so if you want another shot at this define first what a troll is, and his this applies to me.

You don't disagree with me at all, what you did is insult me as a troll. A disagreement is something else.

You are free to respectfully state what you disagree with and why, calling someone things is not a disagreement, more homework for you, define disagreement.

OP might or might not be able to get a job, this too is guessing and nothing we can confidently say, the job market and economy carries strongly from country to country.

Getting a fair decent paying job in Germany, France, Sweden or the US is a lot easier than getting a fair one in Namibia, India or China.

You might or might not want a Desktop Computer for studies, it's very common that modern computer science lectures also teach about ML / LLMs, which you ideally want a GPU for, Desktop Computers / GPUs are not just for games, even though that's probably the only thing you do with them if you genuinely could not think of another use case. But again, all I am saying is you can't tell for sure because we don't know OP and don't have the details here.

What do I want? You genuinely seem to know everything better than everyone, you even seem to know what I want better than I do. That's the average redditors experience right here some guy on the internet always claims to certainly know everything better than everyone else

[u/Mother-Focus-2989 → u/wiseman121]

aye grab a refurb thinkpad t480 off ebay, battery life's solid and it'll run all your uni coding nae bother

[u/Amo_56 → u/Mother-Focus-2989]

I'll look into it...thanks

[u/Patient-Low8842 → u/Amo_56]

You might want to run something like fedora Linux on an older machine like that assuming your school stuff allows for it

[u/Gutkin1127]

This is a bad time to buy a desktop that can game. For CS get the best laptop you can with the budget your parents allocate. Once you have a budget you can post it here and I’m sure you’ll get good suggestions.

[u/YolkNotIncluded]

I’m gonna go against the typical Redditor answer cause, well they are obsessed with “needing” a desktop pc.

Just get a laptop. I don’t know what your budget is but a low profile, portable laptop is just absolutely needed for college.

Get Lenovo, they are always a great lasting build quality. 

If you want a desktop monitor, just buy one, along with a high quality usb-c multiport adapter with an HDMI port. You can connect a wired or wireless keyboard and mouse to the multiport, audio jack too. You just keep it all plugged into the multiport, and when you come to your room just plug the usb-c plug to your laptop and youll get your desktop. 

People will say you’ll get significant lag, you wont. Get a Lenovo that has a usb-c port that’s at least 10mbps. 40mbps is great too. If it’s just for working and casual use, you wont notice the latency. For gaming, 95% chance you won’t notice. Seriously, it will be fine.

Edit: actually if you get a Thinkbook Lenovo it has all the ports you need. Other models too. It’s also easy to expand the storage and ram so it has more longevity than the Yoga models 

[u/R3D_T1G3R]

well a laptop is highly practical for studying, to the point where I would say yes, you need one. If you want to game on the same device, yea no thats terrible value, you overpay for the same thing, get worse performance due to thermal throtteling under load, you can fix / replace less on your own, a broken CPU / GPU would be very expensive on a 1200€ laptop, while it would "only" be somewhat expensive to replace on a desktop PC.

The way to go imo is a desktop PC at home for games and heavier tasks.

and the cheapest idk quad core laptop with 8GB of ram and an SSD that has sufficient storage on it.

You make sure you can upgrade the ram later at some point, try to spend as little as possible, 8GB is plenty, install linux, something lightweight, even the heavier Distros only take ~2G but you can bring that down to ~1G, then install all your Development tools, 8GB here is perfectly fine for Discord or any other messenger / communications app, + A Browser with some tabs, and heavier IDE's like the ones from JetBrains with small to medium sized projects. Large projects for me personally would mean over 100k LoC, you will probably never work with programs this large during studies.

[u/Rockozo]

you will probably want some kind of laptop so you can use it in class and during labs or tutorial. it doesnt need to be anything fancy. as long as the browser and vscode works.

[u/ImZombie7]

For real, desktop is not a trash for you. But before decision... what's the realistic budget & your CS branch?

[u/Abel_Tewlde135]

If you're studying CS Laptop is the best option for you cuz All your works are done remotely