Laptop Buying Advice

Historical information

This information originated in the previous wiki and may be outdated. Prices, Windows versions, hardware capacities, and processor availability below are historical and must be verified before making a purchase.

MSV Incognito often received questions from prospective students about the hardware required to follow a programme in our studies. To streamline things, we created this short page.

Is a laptop required?

Having a laptop is required for computer labs in certain courses. It is also very handy for group projects. You will need a laptop to write, compile, and run Java, Python, and C code. This will, of course, take longer on low-end laptops.

Guidelines from the previous wiki:

• No Chromebook. The laptop must run Windows, Linux, or macOS. This guide only covers Windows laptops, because that is what companies sell and new MacBooks are generally powerful enough anyway.
• AMD Ryzen or modern Intel processors are both fine. Please note that AMD Ryzen CPUs were only recently becoming available in laptops when this guidance was written.
• A 15.6-inch laptop is the most commonly used size. A 14-inch laptop is still fine, depending on your preferences, but anything smaller can make it difficult to type a lot of code (keyboard size) and read code (screen size and resolution). Seventeen-inch laptops are rather large to transport. However, this is down to personal preference.
• Make sure you get a laptop with the keyboard layout you are used to: probably QWERTY for Dutch students, QWERTZ for Germans, AZERTY for French and some Belgian students.

Laptop tiers

To be blunt: everything that could run Windows 10 or a recent Linux variant properly should suffice. In theory, you could manage your studies on a laptop with a low-power Intel or AMD processor, 2 GB RAM, and 16 GB flash memory. But that would lead to annoyances and is not something we recommend. On the other hand, everything would also run on a laptop with a high-end multi-core AMD or Intel processor, 32 GB RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. Depending on your budget, you could even add a dedicated graphics card.

The prices below are historical indications. Many other factors, such as screen quality, battery life, and build quality, influence the price. There are many websites that provide quality reviews to inform you about specific laptop models. Consider finding the right laptop as a small precursor to doing academic research for the projects during your studies.

Approximately €200

This is the “it runs” category: the territory of an Intel Atom or Celeron processor, 2 GB RAM, and 16 GB storage. We do not recommend this, but as long as it runs Windows or Linux, it is technically possible to finish the tasks required for the study.

Approximately €400

This territory is suitable for a student with a limited budget. Laptops with a recent Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3, 4 GB RAM, and a 128 GB SSD were available.

Approximately €600

The best price-to-performance ratio was around this price range. A recent Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5, 8 GB RAM, and a 256 GB SSD was a good laptop configuration and would run anything required for your studies without problems.

Approximately €800

If you had a bigger budget, a laptop with a recent Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7, 8 GB RAM, and a 256 GB SSD would give a minor speed boost over the previous tier. This was also the range where laptops gained something resembling gaming-capable graphics cards.

Gaming

If you wanted your laptop to run games beyond League of Legends or other light games, the options generally started around €900. There were laptops in that category with an AMD or Nvidia GPU capable of running most games. Medium- and high-end gaming laptops were €1,000–€3,000. However, that is outside the scope of this page, since it is not needed for your studies.