Hi, can anyone recommend me a laptop for my Cybersecurity course between $1000-$1300?
Would prefer 32GB RAM.
Thank you.
Laptop for Cybersecurity Degree - Budget $1,300
Comments
Get one with a Kensington Slot.
Really cheap one off aliexpress. Good experience.
Shouldn't really matter what you get, unless part of your course and brute forcing passwords. I'd probably get one with an ethernet port for convenience though.
get one with an ethernet port for convenience though.
I find RS-232 is more than enough…
whoah throwback
Thinkpad. Arch Linux.
Arch? I don't know a lot about cybersec, but am quite sure Kali is the preferred distro :-)
But seriously, for such a course you will be running lots of VMs, hence the request for 32GB (I hope).
Few will come with 32GB, but I hope you have the minimal skills to upgrade it, otherwise you should consider a different career.
Otherwise, the requirements are modest.This being Ozbargain, I'd recommend an ex-corporate "refurbished" laptop.
Op, do you need good battery life? Ultralight? Will you be using an external monitor?Only idiots run Kali bare metal.
Idiots mostly use mobile - IOS and Android.
Before you go pushing thinkpad for Arch - we should talk about the S3 standby problem. Which thinkpads still have S3?
Linux on laptops has become a pain again, due to Microsoft pushing "modern standby".
I thought you needs 64GB for Cybersecurity
You need hardened laptop for cybersecurity degree.
made from the finest chinesium that money can buy
I think anyone studying in IT should at minimum know about the software they need to use and buy according.
Are laptops considered software now?
TIL….software have hardware requirements to run on
Hmm I would imagine, a lot of cybersecurity work involves research.
For that price range you're usually getting something fairly entry level that might be more suited to mum's emails or grandma's facebook memes.
I would stretch to a more mid range machine which from a vendor like Dell is usually about $1600. i5 / Ultra 5 / 32gb ram.
Ultimately though you really need to just do your research and see what you find. What does your course say about what sort of machine you need? If you need to run multiple VMs then you may even need i7 / more cores which then makes your budget closer to $2-2.5k.
You don't need to spend 1000+ for mum's emails or grandma's Facebook memes. I still use a 4th Gen i7 All-In-One with 16GB RAM as my main PC, and it has plenty of grunt to perform day to day internet browsing and run an office suite in parallel. I have even run 2 Ubuntu Linux VMs in parallel in that. Planning to upgrade it to Windows 11 soon as Win10 support ends in October.
Buy a used or refurbished laptop that is 2-3 years old and has replaceable RAM slots (and supports 32GB RAM sticks). Then, you can spend the savings to buy two 32 GB sticks, totaling 64 GB.
Came here to say this. Plenty of great, used, business-grade laptops well under that budget. They are meant to be repairable as well, so usually it's 4 screws to access the insides and upgrade your RAM. Which is also super affordable at the moment.
That will also let you budget for a new battery if you need one. Which are very easy to replace on your own with business laptops.
this is the boring but sensible option, go for this tbh
AFAIK cyber security mostly involves check box compliance activities. So something that will run excel should do.
+++ any actual tests will be handled "in lab" on university setups …. Unless OP wants to try things at home.
IMO - laptop will most likely get used for writing essays + notetyping … rather than any actual cybersec testing.
If you look at min reqs for laptops from Uni's for cybersec … The specs are fairly minimal.
Yes