Hi guys
New to AnandTech and a big fan of the articles already!
I am a third year engineering student. I get lots of lab reports, circuit drawing (using Visio etc) and maths/general programming (Matlab, Maple, Labview etc) to do.
I currently have a 2009 15" Macbook Pro. I really love the battery life but Microsoft Word crashes a lot/lags for me and its always hard finding programs for the Mac version. I have dual booted windows as well but it really heats up the laptop and the battery life drops dramatically.
I would appreciate it if you guys could recommend a cheap secondary laptop with the following requirement:
- 13" to 15" screen
- fast enough to do some email, browsing but also be able to run CPU intensive programs like the homework ones listed above (Word, Matlab, Maple etc) smoothly.
- i barely play any games on computer now, so dont care about graphics card
- would prefer a battery life of atleast 5 hours.
please feel free to suggest a smaller screen netbook as the most important things for me are the price, fast enough to handle matlab and word without lag and battery life.
I really liked the HP dm1z for the price and battery but I am not sure if 1.6GHz is enough for what I want to do and not sure if a 11.6" screen is big enough. Any thoughts on this or any other laptops?
Thanks
New to AnandTech and a big fan of the articles already!
I am a third year engineering student. I get lots of lab reports, circuit drawing (using Visio etc) and maths/general programming (Matlab, Maple, Labview etc) to do.
I currently have a 2009 15" Macbook Pro. I really love the battery life but Microsoft Word crashes a lot/lags for me and its always hard finding programs for the Mac version. I have dual booted windows as well but it really heats up the laptop and the battery life drops dramatically.
I would appreciate it if you guys could recommend a cheap secondary laptop with the following requirement:
- 13" to 15" screen
- fast enough to do some email, browsing but also be able to run CPU intensive programs like the homework ones listed above (Word, Matlab, Maple etc) smoothly.
- i barely play any games on computer now, so dont care about graphics card
- would prefer a battery life of atleast 5 hours.
please feel free to suggest a smaller screen netbook as the most important things for me are the price, fast enough to handle matlab and word without lag and battery life.
I really liked the HP dm1z for the price and battery but I am not sure if 1.6GHz is enough for what I want to do and not sure if a 11.6" screen is big enough. Any thoughts on this or any other laptops?
Thanks