Anyone into Android programming?

[emjay]

Yeah, that was a similar concern for me to the battery - in that this is a refurbished business laptop that could have had a lot of use, or not... no way to know. But the fact that the battery lasted so long does suggest to me that it possibly hasn't had that much use, and therefore that there might be a fair bit of life left in the SSD. I've got a TB external drive and the first thing I did when getting the laptop was create an image of the initial state onto that so I can at least revert back to factory settings as it were if I want to. I might do another now that I've got Unity on. But I still need Visual Studio, and possibly Android Studio just so that I can make Android games with Unity (it seems to need the Android SDK installed?). So a few more big programs to put on before I make my next image. But yeah, I do need to do normal data backups as well. Do you know much about SSDs? I take it they're not quite the same as say an SD card, in that a SD card has a limited number of writes until it become read only but an SSD sounds different from what I've read in that sectors will start to fail? Though it is suggested that there will be software in place to warn you of that way before it actually happens?

You don't need Visual Studio at all, only the Android SDK.  You CAN get a plugin to use Visual Studio as your editor for Unity, but unless you really use VS a lot, I just can't see that this is necessary.

I've heard that writes to SSD are limited and do eventually damage the drive.  However, that might be from the early days of SSD, which weren't that long ago.  There's so much misinformation out there, but a sensible system of backups and safeguards saves all.

Nah, I just meant Visual Studio as separate from Unity, just to have VB and C# alone again, but thanks for saying I only need the SDK as I wasn't sure if I also needed Eclipse or Android Studio, its replacement (which I've never used because I've never had a computer powerful enough to run it until now  ).

Thankfully I don't have much to backup these days because I spend most of my time on this forum (though you wouldn't think it to look at my post count  ), so keeping my data backed up should be quite a simple process.