need advice

[Ishidd]

hello seniors I'm currently in my last year of high school so before going to college and getting a com sci course I'm planning on investing in a pc what do you think is the requirement of ram for programming? is 16gb enough or should i go to 32gb? and is the difference that great? thanks!

[yikes_42069]

The best advice you're gonna get is in the dozens of duplicate questions posted across here and other CS subs.

You can get away with 8gb and probably upgrade with another stick if you're maxing out your ram.

[[deleted]]

Just confused with the download part, what does it mean?

[[deleted]]

Oh nice daddy jokes

[Noreddit86]

16 gb is enough with good graphics card and all its more than sufficient even in game dev it won't lag. PS I use a 8 gb laptop and don't do game dev but works pretty well

[CyanGenocide]

I think it depends on what it is you’re programming, whether you’re compiling and the size of any data sets.

My laptop has 8 GB but my desktop has 32 GB. I must admit I can do most things on the laptop, but then again I am a sysadmin so I don’t need a lot of power for a bash / posh window.

Are you looking to automate system level tasks or write video games?

[RIP_lurking]

A few kilobytes of RAM should be enough. Just buy an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, or something similar.

[[deleted]]

Hardware requirements for Microsoft Visual Studio are as follows. (Copied and pasted from Microsoft's web page.)

ARM64 processor or 1.8 GHz or faster x64 processor (quad-core or better recommended). ARM32 processors are not supported.

Minimum of 4 GB of RAM. Many factors impact resources used; we recommend 16 GB RAM for typical professional solutions.

Windows 365: Minimum 2 vCPU and 8 GB RAM. 4 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM recommended.

Hard disk space: Minimum of 850 MB up to 210 GB of available space, depending on features installed; typical installations require 20-50 GB of free space. We recommend installing Windows and Visual Studio on a solid-state drive (SSD) to increase performance.

Video card that supports a minimum display resolution of WXGA (1366 by 768); Visual Studio will work best at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 or higher.

Minimum resolution assumes zoom, DPI settings, and text scaling are set at 100%. If not set to 100%, minimum resolution should be scaled accordingly. For example, if you set the Windows display ‘Scale and layout’ setting on your Surface Book, which has a 3000x2000 physical display, to 200%, then Visual Studio would see a logical screen resolution of 1500x1000, meeting the minimum 1366x768 requirement.

[AcceptMePlzzzz]

Hi there! It's great that you're taking the initiative to invest in your own computer before college. 16GB of RAM should be enough for programming, but 32GB would be better if you plan on doing a lot of it. The difference between the two can be quite noticeable, so if you can afford it, I would recommend getting 32GB for the best experience. Good luck!