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How weird is it to bring both a desktop and laptop to college?

Tags:
  • Laptops
  • Desktops
  • College
  • Computers
Last response: in Work & Education
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August 18, 2013 2:29:06 PM

I know there's the space factor, but I'm moving in tomorrow and I'll find that out for myself. I figure I'll probably have enough room on my desk for the desktop and my roommate is one of my good friends from HS and a gamer as well, so I'm not worried about any social issues.

The first question is, would it be really strange to have both my desktop and my laptop? The second question is, is it necessary?

They're both fairly powerful computers, but my desktop takes the cake for speed/graphics, not to mention I spent a lot of money on it so I'd like to have it there.

I'll be double majoring in Computer Science and Finance and I need something powerful, but I think both computers fit that criteria.

From a future-proof standpoint, is there a real difference between the two computers?

Basic Specs
Desktop: i7 950, 16 gb RAM, GTX 580, 23'' monitor, 120 gb SSD, 240 gb 10000 RPM HDD, 500 GB 5400 RPM HDD.

Laptop: i7-4700MQ, 8 gb RAM, GT 750M, 14'' screen, 24 gb SSD cache, 1 TB 5400 RPM HDD, advertised 5 hours of battery (even though Windows says 2, dunno which to trust).

I've researched and noticed that my desktop starts up significantly faster, runs games significantly smoother, and can handle more programs than my laptop, even though it has older hardware.

On the other hand, my laptop has so far handled everything I've thrown at it with pretty good success. Would I be better served sucking it up and just going with my laptop to avoid the hassle of having a large and loud desktop in the dorm?

More about : weird bring desktop laptop college

August 18, 2013 8:00:06 PM

I never knew anybody to bring more than one computer to college when I went. There were a few more laptops than desktops but everybody only had one, although pretty much everybody had one. I can't say what people do today as it has been a decade since I was in your shoes and a lot has changed.

- Dorms when I went were little jail cells of a room and had a tiny 3 foot by 2 foot desk which wasn't large enough to hold one decent computer, let alone two. Roughly 10 years ago the price of tuition exploded but as a side effect the dorms all got a lot nicer. You could probably fit two computers in a modern dorm room. And you'd have air conditioning too.

- Price kept a lot of people from having two computers. The P4 Northwood and Athlon XP Palomino were the newest things out and a halfway-decent desktop was $1500 minimum. Laptops routinely cost $2000 or more. That's about $3000-4000 in today's dollars. There wasn't much of an option to use an older machine as they went out of date much faster than they do now. A five year old laptop like I am using now would have been a 200 MHz Pentium MMX compared to a PIII-M or Athlon XP-M which was many times faster.

- Also people didn't take their computers to class as much. A professor pretty well assumed you were screwing off when you had a computer. Wireless was sporadic and if it was there, 802.11b spec and slower than molasses in January.

I did have a laptop and a desktop later on as it did become more accepted/easier to take notes on a laptop as professors released their lectures as PowerPoint slides rather than using film slides or overheads. I got the desktop for work and simply kept my old laptop as I wasn't going to do anything else with it. But I lived in a house at that time and my laptop was pretty well useless for anything besides typing notes and I did all my work on the desktop. I synced my notes from the laptop to the desktop and then did my work. If you anticipate doing this, you might have some benefit from having two machines. Otherwise leave one at home.
September 3, 2013 2:15:55 PM

Unless you're into gaming (That's a potential major distraction from your studies) or plan to use your desktop for video editing or whatever I wouldn't bother bringing it.
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