I will be attending the OSU College of Engineering next year, and noticed that their website has the minimum laptop requirements. For any mac laptop, it must be 1.83 Ghz Core Duo, have 1 GB RAM, and run 10.4 and up.
I was planning on getting a Macbook Air for my classes, which would be 1.6 Ghz Core 2 Duo, have 2 GB RAM, and run Leopard.
Would the 1.6 Core 2 Duo in the Air be enough? I guess there are some engineering programs that need Windows to run (boo) and I will need to use a Virtual Machine program to run those…I am just unsure if the 1.6 is enough though.
Thanks!!!
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If you are taking engineering than you will be going a lot of complex math in both graphics and analysis.
I would want to have something more than the minimum. Now the extra RAM will help but it won’t make crunching the numbers faster.
-tcw
Speaking from experience, I can say that almost any application that you’ll be running for engineering in college won’t require more processing power than what the Macbook Air has.
One thing to be wary of, though, is memory usage when running a VM, as it’s distributed between both OSes. Get the most RAM possible when ordering your MBA, you won’t regret it.
On a quick side note, don’t look only at the fact that it’s a 1.6 GHz processor in the MBA. The purpose of the Core 2 Duo is to lower processing power requirements while keeping up with demands of newer applications.
You might want to upgrade the processor a bit; 1.6ghz probably won’t be enough if they say you need 1.83ghz. Also, if you’re running Windows in a VM, it will not run nearly as fast as it would otherwise. You could try dual-booting with Windows through BootCamp, however.