Entry level laptop comparison for coding

[northernladuk]

Need a bit of help on laptop speeds please.

The laddo is doing an MA in Robotics which requires some level of coding. He has a four year old Aspire 3 i3 laptop which I seem to think was an entry level jobbie back in the day. He says its slow in general which I'd expect being four years old and the rubbish he's accumulated on it over those years.

We've been offered an AsusVivobook 15 X1500EA with Intel Pentium Gold 8 gig ram so thought that might be an upgrade. It's definitely a entry level laptop though. Interestingly a few benchmark sites put the i3 above the Pentium Gold albeit like a few % so not sure it's actually going to be an upgrade. Might be worth just re-formatting the Aspire and continuing with that. Vivo has 8 gig ram, not sure about the Aspire but would have thought upgrading that might be worthwhile instead.

Any coders got any experience with robotics and could share some wisdom on laptop choice for uni? Either of these an option or is this type of stuff going to need a bit more beef?

[hobnob]

It's probably worth looking up the course page for the relevant uni, to find out what programming language they use. (I'm surprised that the course would be an MA rather than an MSc.)

Taking Manchester as an example:
Software for Robotics - course unit details - MSc Robotics - course details (2025 entry) | The University of Manchester
"Students will use the Linux OS, which is widely used in the robotics community and programme in Python."

If the laptop is currently running Windows and you wipe it to install Linux, that will get rid of accumulated rubbish. I'd expect Linux and Python to both run pretty well on that spec of machine.

However, if he wants a Windows machine for other stuff (e.g. writing his dissertation in Word), you're either looking at a second machine or a Linux VM. That's going to be more demanding, particularly in RAM.