Laptop specs for son doing cyber security

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My son is asking for a laptop for his upcoming university course in cyber security. He is planning on using Kali Linux and says he needs something with at least 8GB ram, a powerful CPU, and at half-decent storage.

Now I don't know anything about laptops needed for this sort of stuff, but reading about I'm getting various laptop specs thrown about, such as a laptop with a 4GB GPU for brute force, so naturally, the budget is going up from our original price point of £500 and before we go down the route of spending more, I'd like to know if there are essential specs at out pricepoint that will work for him.

I was looking at something along the lines of a ryzen 5 with 8gb of ram. Any help will be greatly appreciated. TIA
 
Hey @teejay73; most unis' computer science department will likely provide their students with access to server(s) which they can run programs on. I know that when I was a student I thoroughly (ab)used these.

That said, a laptop is obviously a great resource for anyone in either cyber security or computer science. I'd 100% recommend a MacBook Air (macOS being *nix based (FreeBSD)) if the budget was higher, but a cheap (or 2nd hand) anything with the preferred Linux distro is a great option too. Just something to tinker with small bash scripts, but also to make copious amounts of written or math-y notes :)
 
Hey @teejay73; most unis' computer science department will likely provide their students with access to server(s) which they can run programs on. I know that when I was a student I thoroughly (ab)used these.

That said, a laptop is obviously a great resource for anyone in either cyber security or computer science. I'd 100% recommend a MacBook Air (macOS being *nix based (FreeBSD)) if the budget was higher, but a cheap (or 2nd hand) anything with the preferred Linux distro is a great option too. Just something to tinker with small bash scripts, but also to make copious amounts of written or math-y notes :)
Sorry for the late reply and thanks for the help & advice. I've literally just bought him a ryzen 7 based laptop, which he'll run Kali linux on. Hopefully, this will be good enough. It has 8gb ram, a 512gb ssd and the cost was only £600.
 
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