Do you really need a good laptop for programming?
Bonjour, this post explains how you don't need a high end system for programming. Don't be a pineapple on pizza kinda guy by throwing away your older laptops. Always recycle.
Bonjour, this post explains how you don't need a high end system for programming. Don't be a pineapple on pizza kinda guy by throwing away your older laptops. Always recycle.Minimal Laptop
Before starting programming I've found a lot of people dumping away their old laptop's and getting new ones. It is not always worth it, when you have a system that is running windows 7 or mac os 10 smoothly you don't need a new system indeed. I've cross compiled softwares for different architectures in my Pentium machine with 2 gigs of ram. Laptops or computer systems can work however you want them to.
If you have 2 gigs of ram then your system can handle development environments well.
Though I may suggest upgrading to 4 gigs of ram as you might need to multi task and want to run virtualization which also requires virtualization support in your bios. I will explain more about this in the next post.
The right set up
Not just the hardware but you should always keep an eye on what software you are using, it shouldn't just meet your hardware requirements but leave more space for the other services that you might be using. For practicing C/C++ as a beginner you might be using codeblocks but when you know the languages well you should shift compiling your files manually using gcc. This will teach you more about how the flags in gcc are important for the compilation of the code. If you are not comfortable full command line then there are code editors like notepad++ and vs code, just choose one, both support syntax highlighting for popular languages and there is notepadqq as an alternative to notepad++ for linux. If you are on linux the command line editors are very handy, from emacs to nano and vim, all seem to work perfectly.
Optimizing your old laptop
One of the options when having a minimal hardware is to have an operating system that can make most of the system consuming lowest resources. The system having a decent cpu should not bottleneck with other components. If you wish to make your current operating system smoother then you can check my optimization post for that system. Like you just need the runtime environment for interpreter languages while need a development environment for compiled languages. If you are interested on switching to linux operating system you would have a great experience. Learning about various desktop environments, knowing about the flexibility of linux can be a good experience for you. I will try to cover each of the steps in detail in future posts.
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