Computer Labs vs. Laptop for CAD modeling?

saismom
Mon, 08 Jun 2015 01:57:29 +0000

We are in the same situation ( Aero/physics) and you really should get a laptop. I asked the same question in the Reddit ufl forum and this is a synopsis of what they commented:

1)This is a good baseline from the Engineering college. https://www.eng.ufl.edu/students/resources/computer-requirements/
I would definitely suggest bringing around a laptop with a decent battery life, just to avoid the headache of needing to look for an outlet. You can use a Mac, but you should be willing to use bootcamp and put Windows on it. Aside from that, the more Ram the better, and have an external drive to make backups and store any media you don’t want taking up space on a laptop.
2)If you are going into engineering, I suggest at least a decent amount of processing power, as you could be running things like SolidWorks, Matlab, Quartus, LabView, Pumplinks, etc. I just bought the Surface Pro 3 with an i5, but I chose it over others mostly because I wanted something to take notes on. Seeing as you already have a Nexus 10 to do that, you may want to get something with a little more processing power, but it really isn’t necessary, so you could also save yourself some money.
All engineering labs have outlets, so you should be fine with power, and most lectures don’t require a computer, and therefore there are very few outlets in some lecture halls. Like someone said above, lectures are only an hour long, but labs can vary.