Hi, I'm looking for a laptop to study ACS. Which screen size is the sweet spot and how much RAM is required? Which softwares are going to be used throughout the course. Thanks!

Hi Nguyen,

I'm not sure if you have any programming experience, but I didn't when I started and I would recommend at least 15'' monitor for it (although at home I use a 21'' monitor which makes a huge difference). I say this because as you are looking through several lines of codes and perhaps at multiple classes at once you could benefit greately from having them side by side and still legible.

For other simulations softwares you use it is beneficial to split your screen between output and code as well, so if you can have a 17'' laptop that would be ideal, although bear in mind that you will bring it to uni everyday, so a 15'' one might be a good compromise.

In terms of RAM, if you only use Win10 for now I would say to go for at least 8Gb. The softwares we use are not that heavy, but some simulations do benefit from it. If you have less than 8Gb I would recommend you install a Linux distro as well.

An SSD instead of a hard-drive would be great (and that's in general). Graphics wise you don't need that much to be honest.

I currently have an i5 2.4Ghz, with 8 Gb ram, SSD and an older nVidia GPU with 2 Gb ram dedicated and that's more than enough.

In terms of software you will at some point use the JetBrains IDEs for C/C++, Java and even Python. On top of them you will use Multisim and Utilboard from National Instruments, Quartus Prime, MatLab, Atmel Studio among others.

Hope this helps!