SCS Laptop Requirement

The School of Computer Science requires that you have a laptop that meets recommended hardware specifications. These hardware recommendations will allow you to have a laptop that is equipped for your Computer Science courses.

Please note the laptop requirement will only apply to any students who are physically taking courses on campus. At home, a desktop computer meeting the laptop specification is adequate.

Who is required to have a laptop?

Everyone enrolled in a 1st-year COMP course after the 2020/21 school year is required to have a laptop. This includes COMP 1001, 1005, and 1006. Students are expected to retain this laptop for use in subsequent years until the completion of their studies. Not all upper-year courses will require a laptop in class. For those that do, it will be noted in the course outline.

Laptop Specifications

PC or MAC laptops with the following minimum specifications:

  • CPU: Intel i5/i7/i9/Xeon or AMD Ryzen line
  • 8 GB or more of RAM
  • 256 GB or larger hard drive (SSD drive recommended)
  • wireless networking (WiFi)
  • camera, mic, and audio

Computers such as Netbooks, Chromebooks, Smartphones or atom processorsĀ are not suitableĀ for the Computer Science program

For the details on laptop requirements refer to:

Stream Requirements

The following stream requires specialized hardware:

Computer Game Development Stream

The Computer Game Development Stream requires a Windows 10 laptop and a GPU

The Computer Game Development Stream will be using DirectX that runs on Microsoft Windows. The laptop must include a GPU suitable to run recent PC games. There are no other requirements.

Laptop Requirement Links