3 ms·

I must politely disagree with that. It may be that we have been to distinct types of CS programs. Some of my work as an under grad was taxing on my computer an

I must politely disagree with that. It may be that we have been to distinct types of CS programs. Some of my work as an under grad was taxing on my computer and much more so as a grad. Even simple things like compiling a system can quickly get taxing and slow. Some classes require models, algorithms that takes a lot of power to process or to prove. My master thesis was system would run for 48 hours on the desktop I had then, after some optimization got it down from 65 hours. Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. In my experience those resources were already under maximum load during most of the day and parts of the night. Being able to just run them locally was convenient.

mbreese 5y ago
> Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. And I think this is the key point here. Most CS things you can easily handle with the horse power of a Chromebook. And when you hit the 10% of the coursework that you can’t use a Chromebook for, you probably wouldn’t use a “normal” laptop for it either. You’re always going to have jobs that will take a bit more horsepower. Those should be farmed out to a cluster or server anyway. Where I think the OP will have issues is what resources they will need for their research, which again will probably need a server or cluster. Likely, the most taxing thing they will likely need to work on locally is their thesis. This is where I’d think they might run into issues, especially with figures. But even here, Overleaf should be up for the job.
codeisawesome 5y ago
Not to mention being on video calls with classmates / actual classes and also having a few other windows running (lets say Slack / Discord), and maybe driving a decent-resolution monitor.. these relatively basic sounding things can push the CPU/gfx memory/RAM of even higher-end hardware to their limits! Especially if you choose to / need to run all these together and multi-task. That might partially be an indictment of software performance, though.

mbreese 5y ago

> Ideally though you have access to a lab / server that you can offload your hard work on. And I think this is the key point here. Most CS things you can easily handle with the horse power of a Chromebook. And when you hit the 10% of the coursework that you can’t use a Chromebook for, you probably wouldn’t use a “normal” laptop for it either. You’re always going to have jobs that will take a bit more horsepower. Those should be farmed out to a cluster or server anyway. Where I think the OP will have issues is what resources they will need for their research, which again will probably need a server or cluster. Likely, the most taxing thing they will likely need to work on locally is their thesis. This is where I’d think they might run into issues, especially with figures. But even here, Overleaf should be up for the job.

codeisawesome 5y ago

Not to mention being on video calls with classmates / actual classes and also having a few other windows running (lets say Slack / Discord), and maybe driving a decent-resolution monitor.. these relatively basic sounding things can push the CPU/gfx memory/RAM of even higher-end hardware to their limits! Especially if you choose to / need to run all these together and multi-task. That might partially be an indictment of software performance, though.