Hey guys, this is my first post here. I am not totally computer illiterate, but the last time I built my own tower was when a 500Mhz processor was top of the line and you were a god if you could code an HTML webpage by hand. I've been doing a lot of reading and trying to catch up on the new technologies, but I thought it would be more efficient to pick the brains of some more experienced people.
I'm in University and I need a Laptop to run computer simulations involving a lot of data and complex algorithms. An example would be taking 4000 different stocks and the previous 5 years of daily price data and calculating which pairs of stocks have maximum likelihood to have their difference return to a mean given a specified time period. I will also be running a lot of monte carlo simulations (creating thousands of versions of possible scenarios for given constraints across hundreds or thousands of observations).
The programs I will be using for this are Excel and MATLAB. Currently I have an i3 370M and 4 gigs of ddr3. My computer simply cannot handle what I am doing.
I don't play games, but if I had a video card I'm sure I would. And by this I mean I would be happy at playing BF3 at minimum graphic settings.
Now, because I have been out of the loop for so long I no longer know where I should be focusing my efforts and my dollars. So I would like this to be a learning experience as much as I can. Example, I don't know whether 16gigs of ram would be more useful for this as opposed to 8gigs of ram and instead upgrading to an SSD harddrive; or whether the processing power would be the biggest factor in this build, etc.
Budget: $1050
Must: 15.6" Laptop (non Glossy screen if possible)
Optional: Video Card
If you are recommending a certain part or pre-built computer it would be greatly helpful if you could tell me why. I can learn this stuff pretty fast but with so many different things out there now I don't really know where to pick up where I left off.
Thanks Guys. Look forward to sticking around the forum it is good stuff!


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) and look for the "threads" column (you may need to make it visible by going to the "view" menu and choosing "select columns..."). If there is a high number of threads, then you need to look for a machine with a multicore CPU - probably an i7xxxxQM, which are hyperthreaded quad cores. If the number of threads is low, then just look for the highest clock speed you can find.