Laptop for engineering major

College Life
1

<p>I’m going to be an EE/CE major next year. I am the guy that friends always call for help with their PC’s, I built the PC I’m using right now, but I don’t know squat about laptops. My dad has a Macbook Pro and loves it, and so does my cousin, but I’ve been stuck to Windows my whole life. </p>

<p>I was playing around with dad’s macbook yesterday and liked it (how it feels, user-friendliness, didn’t crash even when I super-multitasked). </p>

<p>One thing that concerns me is compatibility. I’ve heard of programs that let you run Windows or Windows apps on a Mac, but how easy are they to use? I also know there’s a Mac version of Office for word/ppt/excel/etc. </p>

<p>The other thing I fear is that a professor will constantly assign things that can only be done on a Windows, and I’ll be stuck going to the library to get them done. Is this a reasonable fear?</p>

2

<p>there’re lots of threads about this.</p>

<p>in two words: boot camp.</p>

3

<p>To answer your last question, yes, that is a reasonable fear. Besides, Macs are the devil’s product ;).</p>

<p>PS I’m also an EE/CE major, and I hate Macs :p.</p>

4

<p>I’m with the above. I hate macs.</p>

5

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<p>No since you can dual boot Windows and OSX on a Mac.</p>

6

<p>you could use either boot camp which lets have a windows partition or something like parallells desktop which I believe is similar to vmware on windows and lets you run a virtual windows from inside osx. I believe both have very good computability with windows programs although I don’t own a mac so I don’t know, and obviously both require you to have a copy of windows, so in adittion to macs already being more expensive for the same hardware it is even more expensive as you’d have to buy windows if you have a strong moral compass</p>

7

<p>Boot camp is preferable for system intensive tasks (lots of hard drive/GPU/CPU access) because you don’t have a huge penalty for virtualization.</p>

<p>Parallels is handy because you can just open it within OS X (rather than reboot, boot into Windows, etc).</p>

<p>Personally, if I were to get a Mac for college, I’d do Windows XP via boot camp.</p>

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<p>Then you should dual boot Linux and Windows. Problem solved. You can configure Linux to your liking and it will do pretty much anything you would ever want it to do (and after all, OS X is Unix, so you’re getting a somewhat similar OS). And for the things you need Windows for, you use Windows.</p>

9

<p>thinkpad, if price is of any issue to you at all.</p>