My wife is starting to take computer science courses toward an undergraduate degree. Her laptop is slow and very likely going to retire itself at any moment (the audio jacket went out of business yesterday so she had to use my laptop for Zoom). I'm considering purchasing a desktop for her, with the following requirements:
- Software needed to open at same time: - IntelliJ (For pretty much every introductory-intermediate course) - Zoom (For online teaching until Fall or next year) - Chrome (at least 20 tabs from what I glimpsed) - A few other applications such as Wechat/Whatsapp/Word/Excel but not at same time.
- No gaming or other high-end activities, so display could be shit
- Must be Windows, at least at the beginning. Once she gets comfortable with introductory programming I'll install a Ubuntu VM for her.
- We already have screens/keyboard/mouse so we only need a box. Adapters for HDMI/VGA will be obtained from other places.
I'm not exactly familiar with boxes nowadays, but I do have some vague ideas. The reason we chose Desktop is...frankly it gives more bang for the bucks. Her requirement is pretty mundane and the only thing I think she needs is 16GB ram because some software would be a beast regarding devouring RAM. So my question is:
- Aside from official manufacturer websites (HP, Lenovo, Dell) and common e-commerce ones (Amazon, Newegg, etc.), any specific website you use to hunt for deals? We are in Canada so maybe US websites don't work.
- Aside from traditional desktop tower, is there any other option nowadays? How about NUC? I think you still have to purchase and install HD and memory right?
- What about purchasing parts and assemble by ourselves? Would that cut down the price significantly (like 15%+)? Neither of us has done that before so wondering is there any "kit" to work on? There are tons of guides for sure though.
For productivity though, nothing really beats a laptop. The ability to hide in a dark corner with a set of headphones for a couple hours to work in silence is worth all the compromises.
All that said, we can't help much without knowing your budget. I've recommended both the M1 MBAs and cheap Chromebooks to different people before and they both might work for you. From your requirements, anything made in the last 10 years might work so I'd aim for something that won't break when dropped rather than benchmark results.