Health Check

Author

Jon Reades

Published

August 30, 2025

This guide will help you to perform a basic ‘health check’ on your computer to see if you’re likely to run into problems running the programming environment. When answering the questions below, ‘your computer’ is the machine on which you plan to do the programming.

TL;DR

If your computer is less than 4 years old, has at least 16GB of RAM and more than 30GB of free disk space then you’re probably fine. The only other common pitfall is having Windows 10 Home installed.

If your computer doesn’t meet the base requirements, have a look at our recommendations below.

We try to support as many different configurations as possible, but there is no programming environment that installs and runs seamlessly on all computers so if you run into issues please come back to this guide.

Hardware Requirements

In our experience the students most likely to encounter problems share one or more of the following:

  1. Your computer has less than 16GB of RAM.
  2. Your computer has less than 30GB of free disk space remaining.

Read on below to check what specification you have…

You will need to look up:

You will need to look up:

We’re going to assume that you know what you’re doing. If you want a recommendation, we’d probably go with the latest Ubuntu desktop release.

If your computer has 16GB or less of RAM and/or less than 30GB of free disk space you are very likely to have issues with virtualisation and (on Windows) WSL2. Your options are: 1) add more RAM (possible on most Windows computers); 2) back up and remove unnecessary files (Movies, Photos, and Applications are particularly big ‘hogs’).

Software Requirements

In our experience the students most likely to encounter problems share one or more of the following:

  1. Your computer runs Windows 10 Home or older, or
  2. Your computer runs MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra) or older.

As long as your computer is running one of the last two major releases of the Operating System you should encounter few issues.

You will need to look up:

  • What Operating System and Version is your computer running? Help for Mac.

You will need to look up:

Update the Operating System

If you are using a Mac then your system should have the option to update to the latest version of the MacOS at no charge. If you are unable to update then it is likely that you have an older machine that is not fully supported by the most recent Operating System and, in all probability, you will also encounter issues running the programming environment.

If you are using a Windows PC then try to update to either Windows 11 or to Windows 10 Pro as this will ‘unlock’ additional features that are useful for supporting the programming environment. As a student you are likely to qualify for significantly cheaper/free updates, so make sure you do this when you have access to a discount.

Automatic Updates

Once you have installed the programming environment we strongly recommend that you turn off automatic updates for your computer until the end of the academic year. This is not to say that you should not install security and other updates over the course of the year, but to emphasise that it should be at a time of your choosing. In previous years, students’ computers have automatically updated to a whole new operating system version two nights before an assessment deadline, breaking existing code and causing lots of needless stress.

Recommendations

If you are looking for a recommendation as to what to buy:

  1. Don’t worry about getting the fastest chip, get as much RAM as you can. You should aim for at least 32GB of RAM, but get more if you can afford it.
  2. Don’t worry about getting the biggest hard drive, get the fastest one you can. You should always get a SSD (Solid State Drive), but get a M2 type SSD if you can afford it and it’s available for your system.
  3. Only after you’ve sorted this out should you look for the fastest chipset that’s still within your budget.

Should you buy a Windows, Linux, or Apple machine?

You should probably stick with whatever you’re familiar with since learning your way around a new Operating System while also learning to code is just raising the bar unnecessarily. Around CASA we use a mix of all three, and you can probably find as many opinions as there are staff members.

Saving Money

Two easy things to do to save money on a new machine are:

  1. Don’t buy the latest and fastest machine, buy a model from earlier in the year/the previous year instead and upgrade the RAM and hard drive instead.
  2. Only buy the machine when you have access to a student discount. The discount for Apple computers is relatively modest (ca. 10%) compared to ‘back to school’ offers for Windows machines, but as the Brits would say: even 10% is better than a kick in the teeth!