Development Laptop

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DigiBanks99

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Hi guys,

I am interested in a laptop that I can use for development. I will most probably opt to go for a dual-boot Ubuntu/Win7 system. The development will mostly be a continuation of my hobby, and nothing truly professional. However, it is important that I find something which can run and compile OpenGL/Direct X code and preferably the latest UDK as well. I rather want something that will suit my needs than something extremely powerful.

Thanks
 
I would go for any laptop with a Intel second generation i5 and a above average dedicated GPU if you are going to be doing any OpenGL and Direct X coding. What is your budget?
 
What software development are you going to do, because there are many different IDE's that you can use and some requires a much more powerful machine than others.
Like if you're going to do backend web development, then even an i3 Mobile CPU with 3GB of RAM would suffice.

Secondly, are you going to use an external screen with it and what kind of inputs does it have?

Unfortunately the laptops with higher than HD (1366x768) resolutions pretty much start at R8k, so you'll have to use an external screen or you'll have to spend more on the laptop.

For the web (PHP), Java & iPhone development that I've done I really don't like working with a screen resolution smaller than 1920x1080 ! Even my laptop's screen is 1920x1200 and my home PC's screen is 2560x1600.

Lastly, if the laptop is going to be your only machine that you're going to use for coding, I would strongly recommend that you go for like a Dell laptop with a 3yr next business day warranty - otherwise you might end up having to wait a week or more when something goes wrong with the laptop...
 
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Hey Pada

Like I mentioned above, it will mostly be a continuation of my hobby. I have a lot of time on my hands at work and I want to use it to test some ideas and play around a bit. If I really want to do some serious coding, I'll use my desktop at home.

It will mainly be to learn some new skills, and it will be at most 2 hours a day, so I think I can stand lower resolutions for a short while each day. I tend to shy away from web development, and as I feel is kind of obvious to pick up from my original post, I enjoy game development and playing around with that.

Price is not that important to me, but I don't want people to recommend R16000 laptops. I just want something I can use with relative comfort that provides sufficient power.;)
 
I work for a dev company, even though I'm not really developer, I was lucky enough to get a Dev specced laptop, If I'm not mistaken it was just over 10k, and the developers love this pc, (use it as a guide line if you want)

HP EliteBook 8760w (Core i5 2.6Ghz, 4GB ddr, 500gb, ATI 6700m 1GB)

I have to agree, so far it performs really well, even in the gaming arena, I can do crysis 2/cod 3mw at max settings.

I dual boot with Ubuntu 12.04 / Windows 7 - no issues.

Hope this helps.

Goodluck.
 
Gozzy said:
I work for a dev company, even though I'm not really developer, I was lucky enough to get a Dev specced laptop, If I'm not mistaken it was just over 10k, and the developers love this pc.
Click to expand...

Not to sound sour but I've seen this in the past and never really understood the logic of the allocation of hardware resources in corporate IT policy. Non-developer gets state of the art machine with latest processor and many gigs of memory, only needs machine for Outlook, internet, documents and some minor tasks. Developer has to keep older generation hardware and half the memory while using resource intensive tools such as IDEs and OS virtualization. And if you complain, it's only seen as complaints: poor developer only wants latest gadgets. Meanwhile all they wants is to be efficient in their job. And that job needs more resources than Outlook.

/rant
 
At our company we switched from crappy Lenovo's to Dell (vostros) about two years ago...and they are AWESOME! If you take into account the punishment these lappies go through (extended working hours, constant charge/discharging, compiling a large code base, no regular cleaning etc etc) and the fact that they still operate like new is a testament to their quality.
 
For development I would say try get 8GB RAM. Helps with VMs if you use that.

Processor not so important. i3 or i5.
Don't get a 5400RPM hard drive . Either 7200RPM or SSD.
 
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