Laptop requirements Spatial Sciences

Our faculty has a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for students. This effectively means that you are expected to bring your own laptop to class. BYOD enables you to utilize the full potential of your laptop without dependance of computer labs and ensures seamless integration of personal electronic devices for academic purposes.

Next to usual software such as Microsoft Office, students will make use of other software during their studies. This includes Geographical Information Systems (ArcGIS), statistical software (R), and visualization software (Adobe suite). These programs cannot run on every operating system.

Which laptop?

We advise students to acquire a Windows laptop. All software used during the courses works on Windows. Because of the software used and its size, we strongly recommend students acquire a laptop with the following specifications:

• Suitable for Windows 10 (64 bits)
• A multi-core (quad-core) processor
• A discrete (dedicated) video card of 4 Gb minimum
• At least 32 GB of RAM (64 GB recommended)
• At least 256 GB of storage (512 GB recommended)
• At least 14” full HD screen (1920 x 1080)

We do not recommend using laptops running on operating systems other than Windows.

If you do not have access to an adequate laptop, please contact our study advisors via study.advice.fss@rug.nl