All students enrolled in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) courses are required to have a laptop they can use in classes and for their studies. HCDE recommends the following minimum laptop specifications:

• Intel® Core 2 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor; 2 GHz or faster processor
• 4GB of RAM (8GB recommended)
• 160GB hard drive or larger
• 1024 x 768 display (1280 x 800 recommended) and 512 MB of VRAM (2 GB recommended)
• Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 or Mac OSX 10.10 (Yosemite) or greater

Students who are interested in purchasing a laptop can do so at many places including the UW Book Store, which offers discounts to UW students on both hardware and software. Some of the recommended laptops from the bookstore are:

• Dell Inspiron 5000 Series
• Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook
• Alienware 14
• MacBook Air/Pro

For information on academic software, please visit the HCDE technical course work and software page.