R help - Jan 2015 - Minimum system requirements for running R on a Windows PC

Hi everyone,

I was hoping that someone could help me with getting the information for
the minimal requirements my PC would need to run R.

I have an ancient toshiba laptop and I am looking to get a new one before I
take a course in using R in scientific research this February but I want to
make sure I get something that can deal with it. For example, would a
netbook be adequate? Or would I need something more powerful?

Thanks for any help on this!

Alex

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On 09/01/2015 2:23 PM, Alex Austin wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I was hoping that someone could help me with getting the information for
> the minimal requirements my PC would need to run R.
>
> I have an ancient toshiba laptop and I am looking to get a new one before I
> take a course in using R in scientific research this February but I want to
> make sure I get something that can deal with it. For example, would a
> netbook be adequate? Or would I need something more powerful?
Netbooks vary a lot, but many of them use fairly strange processors and 
you'd probably have trouble running R.  The ones that are really just 
small-form-factor laptops should be okay.

But your old toshiba laptop is probably okay too --- as long as it is 
running Windows XP or newer, it is probably fine for R.

Duncan Murdoch

This is a very hard question to answer. I can "run" R on my phone, but
I cannot do my normal work with it there. R is likely to run on most computers
to some degree... and cloud computing (e.g. parallel package with Amazon virtual
computers) can be used to do what your laptop cannot do.

4-8GB of RAM should do almost any examples you need to do for a class.

Note that a netbook usually has a single processor... one nice solution if you
find yourself compute-limited is to use the parallel package on your own
computer to exercise the multiple processors available on most standard laptops.
That would not be an option on most netbooks (though using external computing
facilities is still an option... you just have to fall back on external
resources sooner with a netbook).
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On January 9, 2015 12:21:33 PM PST, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at
gmail.com> wrote:
>On 09/01/2015 2:23 PM, Alex Austin wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I was hoping that someone could help me with getting the information
>for
>> the minimal requirements my PC would need to run R.
>>
>> I have an ancient toshiba laptop and I am looking to get a new one
>before I
>> take a course in using R in scientific research this February but I
>want to
>> make sure I get something that can deal with it. For example, would a
>> netbook be adequate? Or would I need something more powerful?
>
>Netbooks vary a lot, but many of them use fairly strange processors and
>
>you'd probably have trouble running R.  The ones that are really just 
>small-form-factor laptops should be okay.
>
>But your old toshiba laptop is probably okay too --- as long as it is 
>running Windows XP or newer, it is probably fine for R.
>
>Duncan Murdoch
>
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