Purchasing a Computer
Contract Suppliers
USC Business 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:
| Supplier | Contact | Email Address |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Computer | Stacey Mello | smello@apple.com |
| Dell Computer | Lisa Velez Perry Vu | lisa.velez@dell.com perry.vu@dell.com |
| Hewlett Packard | Kevin Kim | kevin.kim@hp.com |
| Lenovo | Jackson Tsao | jtsao@lenovo.com |
For a complete listing of contract computer suppliers, please consult: https://procurement.usc.edu
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. You can also view ITS Computing Recommendations for helpful hardware comparison tables. Typically, your choices will come down to Microsoft Windows PCs, Apple OS X computers or Linux.
PC: Currently Microsoft Windows 11 Enterprise is installed on computers managed by Viterbi IT.
Apple: Apple Mac computers works 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.
- Parallels, an additional piece of software, requires only 100MB plus space to allocate to your virtual machine.
- VMFusion, similar to Parallels, requires 275MB plus 1GB (minimum) per virtual machine.
- Virtualbox, free from Sun.
Please Note: All the options require the additional purchase of the Windows Operating System.
Software Inquiries
Microsoft Office 2021 is the standard productivity application for the Viterbi School of Engineering. For those wishing to purchase a personal version of Microsoft Office, it is important to know that you can get it cheaper than what most manufacturers charge. Microsoft offers a "Student and Teacher Edition" which can be found at many electronics stores. The Trojan Computer Store (213-740-7692) currently offers a discount on Office Professional. Please call them for the current price.
If you plan to run Virtual Machine software you should get at least 8 GB 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.
Published on June 16th, 2017
Last updated on August 1st, 2023