Engineering student dilemma

[dpakrr]

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

 

[drinkmorejava]

Wrong thread. I would try SFF, Notebooks, Pre-Built/Barebones PCs

Why are you using Visio for circuit drawing. At least use PSpice or Eagle or something

 

[Brainonska511]

If you want netbook, something with the E350 might be good, like the Lenovo X120e (but search for deals on the web before buying and/or check their student discount section)
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/c...D5&action=init

 

[rdp6]

I got through last 2 years of EE with dual booting my 2006 mbp which was plenty fast for matlab. I learned to write efficient code during a co-op term. 2 semesters of controls I used lab & IEEE room desktops since they had the controls and symbolic math toolboxes which I didn't have with my beta copy. However my final term included a system simulation class which essentially was exploring ways to compute systems of differential equations - that one the mbp rocked. I was the only one familiar with the code optimizing tools, apparantly.

Anyways, Word 2007 was / is extremely stable in Windows, native or by vm. Development suites for embedded systems? may as well just do all that work in the lab.
Maybe I am weird, but I did all of my school work at school. Almost never after freshman year did any school work at home. I did however spend dawn to well into the evening on campus to complete 120 of 137 required credits in 3 years.

 

[fishsauce]

Which ever laptop you get, try to get a higher resolution screen. Either 1600x900 or 1920x1080 would be great for work space.

I went through engineering school with a 1280x800 screen and thought that was too small for doing schematics, writing code and writing essays.

 

[xSauronx]

id say a timeline x with an i5, build quality is ok, battery life is very good and theyre under a grand easily....thing is the resolution is 1366x768, and i agree with another post that youll want a high res screen if youre really going to work regularly

 

[wwswimming]

Dell XPS15 is hard to beat - their price on the quad core is good.