Hardware

Contract Suppliers

USC Purchasing Services has established numerous contract computer suppliers. Contract Suppliers are suppliers which the university has a negotiated or bid agreement that could include price discounts, simplified ordering methods, set delivery arrangements, specialized customer service requirements, and billing payment methods. Bidding is not required when a purchase is made with a Contract Supplier. Partial listing of contract computer suppliers below:

For a complete listing of contract computer suppliers, please consult: https://procurement.usc.edu/purchases/buying-goods/

What brand should I buy?

Viterbi IT does not recommend specific brands of computers. However, we recommend that you investigate via computer publications or websites such as PC Magazine’s at www.pcmag.com. Typically, your choices will come down to Microsoft Windows PCs, Apple OS X computers or Linux.

PC: Currently Microsoft Windows 11 is installed on computers managed by Viterbi IT.

Apple: Apple Mac computers work fine with the existing Viterbi IT infrastructure. However, please keep in mind that software choices may not be as plentiful and varied as on the PC. You may need to consider the following software options for a Mac if you would like to run Windows software.

• Boot Camp (which comes installed and lets the user install Windows on a Intel-based Mac computer) needs at least a 5GB partition on the computer to work.
• Parallels, an additional piece of software, requires only 100MB plus space to allocate to your virtual machine.
• VMware Fusion, similar to Parallels, requires 275MB plus 1GB (minimum) per virtual machine.
• Virtualbox is a free virtualiztaion solution. Virtualbox requires an x86 processor.

M1,M2, and M3 Apple computers do not support Boot Camp and Virtualbox. If you need to run Windows software, Parallels and VMware Fusion allows you to run Windows OS on the same architecture. Running an x86 Intel-based operating system on M1/M2 computers will not work.

Please note: All the options require the additional purchase of the Windows Operating System.

Should I get a desktop or a laptop?

We suggest visiting your local electronics store to shop around for laptops with different screens for your personal preferences.

If you plan to run Virtual Machine software you should get at least 4GB of memory.

Extended Warranty – Laptops experience much more wear and tear than desktops, and can be very expensive to fix. Getting on-site repair reduces the time you will spend without your computer.