Laptop for Physics PhD

[mandark]

Hi everyone,

 

Looking for a new computer for grad school.

I will need to run some simulations and computational stuff locally. I also need to put together presentations quite often (~3/month).

Dont care about local memory too much since I have a 4tb external drive to store all my data.

 

Any suggestions would be great! Even just sharing your current setup is fine too.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

Anything Lenovo  I use a cheap $300 Lenovo to keep at school for Matlab/Mathematica/programming as well as some word processing, etc. and then I also have a better computer at home. You could probably spend a few hundred more dollars and get a REALLY nice Lenovo for the price.

 

Really though, as long as it's a PC, it doesn't matter

 

[MathCat]

I would not recommend a Lenovo. I bought a fairly high end one about 16 months ago, and the battery just failed completely, after I'm out of warranty of course. And I can't seem to get it replaced because they don't sell the battery, so I can only use it plugged in now.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

42 minutes ago, MathCat said:

I would not recommend a Lenovo. I bought a fairly high end one about 16 months ago, and the battery just failed completely, after I'm out of warranty of course. And I can't seem to get it replaced because they don't sell the battery, so I can only use it plugged in now.

Strange, they don't sell a battery? I was looking for a backup battery and was able to find one on Amazon and Ebay with no problems. I've had 3 Lenovos now, with no issues. But that's good to know.

[MathCat]

19 minutes ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

Strange, they don't sell a battery? I was looking for a backup battery and was able to find one on Amazon and Ebay with no problems. I've had 3 Lenovos now, with no issues. But that's good to know.

It will certainly depend on the model. They do not sell them for most of their ultrabooks, I believe.

[cwr]

I use a Macbook Pro (256 GB SSD, 8 GB Ram, 2.6 GHz Intel i5), which is essentially the standard setup for HEP-ex, and it works fine for my purposes.

Then again, anything computationally heavy/long I will do remotely just for the sake of convenience, so if you're going to be doing heavy lifting on your own machine (by which I mean working remotely on a university/lab cluster is not feasible), I would not take this recommendation too seriously.

[juilletmercredi]

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I had a ThinkPad back in 2004 when they were owned by IBM. They're good, durable computers, and I highly recommend the X1 Carbon personally.

But yeah, lots of brands are making good computers these days. Check out Asus, HP, Dell (the XPS line has good reviews, and so does their business-oriented Latitude line) and Toshiba.

[Pink Fuzzy Bunny]

On 4/28/2016 at 5:01 PM, cwr said:

I use a Macbook Pro (256 GB SSD, 8 GB Ram, 2.6 GHz Intel i5), which is essentially the standard setup for HEP-ex, and it works fine for my purposes.

Then again, anything computationally heavy/long I will do remotely just for the sake of convenience, so if you're going to be doing heavy lifting on your own machine (by which I mean working remotely on a university/lab cluster is not feasible), I would not take this recommendation too seriously.

I also found this when I did a summer internship in HEP-ex... a lot of software packages unique to HEP are pretty finicky to get working on a PC... something that OP should definitely consider.

[mandark]

2 hours ago, Pink Fuzzy Bunny said:

I also found this when I did a summer internship in HEP-ex... a lot of software packages unique to HEP are pretty finicky to get working on a PC... something that OP should definitely consider.

I'll be going in for HEP so I'm leaning towards a macbook now. Do most people get computers subsidized by their program/adviser?

[cwr]

3 hours ago, mandark said:

I'll be going in for HEP so I'm leaning towards a macbook now. Do most people get computers subsidized by their program/adviser?

If you're doing HEP, then a Macbook is almost required. You can always dual boot or otherwise configure a PC to run what you need, but everything will run out-of-the-box in a Mac, which is why I use the word "almost." 

As far as getting it subsidized, I think this is relatively standard as well. Worst case, you could ask your advisor or department if there are funds for this. My undergrad advisor/department paid for my Macbook when I was starting out a few years ago, and I will probably need to replace it before I start my Ph.D., so I'll see if I can get my new department to cover it when the time comes.