[nfbcs] best computer for a CS student?

[Littlefield, Tyler]

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Hello:
It's going to be really hard to find a system that has two drives that
is portable. I had a lenovo (the school gives you a free computer for
paying their tuition). It had a 320 gb drive, which was a bit small.
The Mac they recently gave hme has a 512 gb SSD which is plenty. If
you want to experiment, get vmware Fusion.
So here's what I'd look for:
40 cell braille display, if you are a braille reader. Robert prefers
an 80 cell, but that's pretty large if you're in school and you can't
take it with you.
8-16 gb ram.
decent harddrive, nothing smaller than 512 gb ssd or 500 gb harddrive
(you will need room for a couple vms).
decent CPU: 3.2 ghz, probably a quad core. The more work you do the
larger project you'll be working on. Being able to compile faster will
be really useful.
Passport 1 tb drive. (Always really nice to be able to bacvk stuff up,
store old code, etc).

HTH,
On 2/22/2015 9:36 PM, Robert Jaquiss via nfbcs wrote:
> Hello Jorge:
> 
> I would suggest checking with the community college and find out
> what platforms they are using. You could end up doing work with
> both Linux and Windows. Some people have used Macs and then used
> Vmware to set up Windows and Linux virtual machines. Of course, you
> have to have JAWS for the Windows machine and at least brltty for
> the Linux machine. The machine you get may need to last a few
> years, so I would get the fastest CPU, at least 8 or 16GB of RAM, a
> drive that can write blu-ray discs and two hard drives. The blu-ray
> writer will let you backup your files. Having two hard drives
> might be handy if you wanted to have a drive that you could
> experiment on without endangering your main drive. I am a braille
> reader, and have a BS/CS degree. I find an 80 cell braille display
> essential for programming. It helps to be able to see the indented
> sections of code. This is especially handy for Python. I agree with
> the other comments that it is good to dig into a language and work
> on learning it. You are also wise to do freelance work while in
> college. This will enhance your resumé. Hope this helps.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Robert
> 
> 
> -----Original Message----- From: nfbcs
> [mailto:nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Jorge Paez via 
> nfbcs Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2015 12:41 PM To:
> nfbcs at nfbnet.org Subject: [nfbcs] best computer for a CS student?
> 
> Hi all: My name is Jorge. I just graduated high school last year
> and had to take a year off because my family and I moved to Florida
> from New York City, so I was waiting for the residency rule to kick
> in college wise because the tuition is about half or more of what
> out-of-state students pay. At any rate, I've already got my
> acceptance letter to community college, and I'm going to be
> majoring in Programming and Analysis. My question is, what computer
> would be better for me in terms of school work? I don't know what
> language my classes are going to use, but since I'm also going to
> be doing a lot of work outside of class--I'm going to be a 
> freelance programmer on the side--I already know HTML pretty well
> and I'm going to be learning other languages soon, what computer
> has the biggest number of accessible development environments for
> the most number of languages? I have experience using both Mac and
> Windows, using Voice Over, JAWS and System Access, so the
> screenreader isn't a problem for me.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jorge
> 
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> 
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- -- 
Take care,
Ty
twitter: @sorressean
web:http://tysdomain.com
pubkey: http://tysdomain.com/files/pubkey.asc
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