Ask HN: Purchasing a Desktop for Computer Science Undergraduate Study | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Purchasing a Desktop for Computer Science Undergraduate Study

1 pointmarkus_zhang6 comments

Hi friends, please allow me to talk about the background first.

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.

It's nice to have a desktop around, even outside of productivity. I have an ancient 2550k set up as a media centre to run a TV that I also use for playing with bots, crypto and anything else long-running. It's also nice as a backup in case a laptop dies. This thing is about 7 years old now though and would still hit your requirements without trying.

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.

Sorry I forgot to put budget. Between CAD 1000 and 1200 I think. It's a bit low so we are looking for desktops. But if there is a great laptop deal we will take it too.

I'm OK with old stuffs but looks like manufacturers are not pushing them. Is there a website that is suitable for this kind of requirements?

Thank you!

That’s actually a very generous budget. With the requirements you have, I was expecting something in the 100-200 range!

For used gear, check out eBay, Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace. Old desktops will probably need to be dusted and re-pasted.

For new gear, a big box retailer like Best Buy might be your best bet because they’ll make warranty/support stuff easier for you.

If you want to try building one, Canada Computers, New Egg and Memory Express are the ones I hear about most often.

Over the next few years, is it likely that she will study machine learning? My default answer would be yes, and if so, that could affect the answer. I will let others comment on recommended hardware for machine learning.

If just playing around with machine learning to learn it, might be a lot cheaper to rent a GPU on AWS short-term than invest in hardware? Wording this as a question because I don't know off-hand what the cost breakdown actually is right now.

Thanks. Not likely, I'm not exactly sure about the path she will take TBH but machine learning is probably not on the path.

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