What do Engineering students use their laptops for?

In September I will be starting a Mechanical Engineering degree at UoN. I am looking for laptop consultation from students in the midst of their Engineering degrees. Hence I ask the question in the title, as a means to determine what computer specifications I need.

I don't know what UoN is

Some manage to get actual engineering software installed on their laptops, either via their department who may have licenses to provide to students, or nefarious means, but this is far from necessary

most engineering students use their laptops for internet and writing reports. I never had a laptop for most of my studies and even when I did get one I didn't use it much.

Aside from normal usage: Matlab, programming suites, as a mechanical engineer you'll also use CFD and CAD programs which are pretty computer heavy. It might not be necessary to do these on your laptop though, although it will always be convenient and potentially quicker depending on how good your uni's computers are.

So to be on the safe side I'd say get a small, cheap laptop with an i7 and 8GB of memory, graphics won't matter too much unless you want to game, same goes for having an SSD.

Yes, that's in line with what I was thinking. My university is well equipped to deal with the demands of engineering software, so is it really worth the extra expense for an i7 over an i5? Would an i5-6300HQ or even a dual core i5/i7 suffice for a bit of casual CAD for example (bearing in mind I'll have a GTX 960/950m)? Or would the performance be excruciating?

By "small" do you mean less than 15.6"? Also, what's your definition of "cheap"?

You say it's far from necessary, but can you see any benefit to having the software on a laptop? In my mind, I envisage increased productivity, since I wouldn't have to traipse down to the computer labs every time I need to use the software.

So would you argue that finding a laptop with a long battery life and high-end specs is not paramount?

Would an i5-6300HQ or even a dual core i5/i7 suffice for a bit of casual CAD for example (bearing in mind I'll have a GTX 960/950m)? Or would the performance be excruciating?

Thanks for starting this thread.
Would a MacBook Pro suffice? I use it a lot for my studies and might be planning to use it for uni. I do have a Windows laptop though but not too sure about having to carry two laptops around.

I just finished first year aero, I have a MacBook Pro and Windows PC in my room. It's perfectly fine, you can pretty much do everything on a MacBook apart from stuff like CAD programs, but you don't use CAD throughout the entire year, you get about 3 or 4 assignments and usually you have dedicated computer rooms for your year anyway where you get help from tutors so I usually went to them and completed my work there, or when I'm feeling lazy to go to those sessions I just designed stuff in my room on my PC, you can do the same on your windows laptop, so yeah no need to carry 2 laptops around.


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A little late to the party but I'm currently at UoN doing MechEng and doing solidworks on a laptop is a myth. Most of the people i know here have been using solidworks in c19 ( one of the rooms which has like 70 PCs which r fully equipped to run solidworks). When you are running a part your laptop should find it fine to run but when you are dealing with multiple parts in an assembly then your #screwed. We also do matlab but that can run on any pc or laptop. To sum it up, get a laptop for general use and just use a desktop pc for solidworks.