Desktop or Laptop or Both?

sabertoothtiger
Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:07:29 +0000

There’s definitely enough room in the dorms to use both. I use a laptop and a desktop, and my roommate and I have 5 LCD screens between us (CS majors, of course…). In my experience the ideal setup is a powerful desktop for real work/gaming/hosting and a light, cheap laptop for coding and checking email between (or during) classes.

A decently powerful, medium-size laptop will also do the job and save some space. In that case, I would go with a ThinkPad or MacBook Pro. I don’t have a tablet PC, but a lot of people say they’re really useful as well.

A desktop would also suffice. I use my desktop for most of my work, and earlier in the year I hardly ever used my laptop. There are clusters all over the place, and it only takes a few seconds to log in and check email (assuming you use the Linux clusters…it takes a lot longer to log in on the Windows and Apple machines). As far as doing work during the day without a laptop, many people store their files in their AFS filespace (AFS is the big awesome distributed file system connecting CMU, MIT, and a bunch of other university networks) and work from there.

It comes down to your budget and personal preferences. As long as you have your own computer you’ll be fine.

By the way, it’s really easy to host on the campus network. They don’t put up any real barriers other than the bandwidth limits (2GB/day on wired, 750 MB/day on wireless).