My college basically gives me four recommended laptops, and gives a discount on each one (I’ll basically use the laptop for engineering work in class, maybe some 3D modeling like Maya or 3DS max, and I plan to use it as my main computer for 5+ years):
Do you think that there’d be a notable performance advantage to the second and third laptops when running modeling or engineering software? What about when running matlab or maple?
Will I ever (seriously) need more than 160 GB of space?
The money is important to me, but I want a PC that isn’t going to start chugging along and crashing in tough renderings or calculations. That’s my fear.
**Part 2, tablet: **
I’d kind of like to have a tablet that I could plug into my PC, which I could write notes and equations on, and then have some program on the PC convert it into text and math equations.
If anything like that exists, and would cost less than 700 or so dollars, do you know where I could look for it?
Do you think that laptop 3 would really be a lot better for engineering work? I mean, I know its better, but will it really offset the cost? For quite a while I’ve been working with a 1.6 ghz pentium 4 with 128 kb cache and 768 mb of RAM, and its worked pretty well. But I’ve never tried to run 3DS max or serious engineering work on the computer either.
(that seems weird usually all of Dell.com is discounted 15% for colleges/universities).
It’s a special deal with the college. I wonder how much that laptop would cost normally?
BLUE, laptop video cards are integrated with the the on board ram through the motherboard so my 8400M has 800mb of ram at its disposal. The video cards don’t have to be integrated either to do this a lot of the motherboards do this, but Al will have to read up on how much it shares.
We’ll if you get 4gig it will ship with Windows Vista 64bit. I think it would help if you could tell us maybe what laptops these are because the whole form factor means a lot. I’ve got 160gig hard drive and 2gb 2.4ghz in my my old laptop but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world because it has like 6h of battery life per each 9cell I have, this is something you need to consider do you want to always be forced to sit near an outlet.
For university you really need to look at the design of the laptop just as much as the hardware.
Look into Apple’s laptops. Mine is going on 2 years old and it’s still working great (and is nowhere near obsolete yet). The only thing I’ve had to do is get a new battery because I use like 2 charge cycles per day. But that’s pretty typical for a laptop battery life.
They’re all different editions of the Dell XPS M1530. They all have a “56 WHr” battery, although I’d imagine the versions with the faster CPU burn it off faster.
Oh yeah, and the 2nd & 3rd options have an integrated “Audigy HD Sound Blaster” sound card. How much that would help performance, I have no clue.
I don’t think you will be needing the use of that sound card very much if you’re in any engineering field except sound engineering or something along the lines of that. Option 2 and 3 look very attractive. I would look at the requirements for some of the intensive software you will be running. Based on those, look for something a tad bit more powerful so that way you can multitask and such while working (this is where those 4 gigs of ram come in to play)
I mentioned this already in the other laptop thread, but Lenovo currently has some pretty good deals on ThinkPads. (There are new models coming out in a month or so, hence the big discounts.) You can spec out a machine with an nVidia Quadro graphics card that would be really nice for 3D modeling work. They are solid systems that should last for many years of regular use.
(No, I do not work for Lenovo, I am just excited that I was actually able to afford a Thinkpad!)
I just want to be able to run Inventor, perhaps 3DS Max, Microsoft Word, and Maple - perhaps with a little bit of multi-tasking at the lowest possible price.
Unless there’s a great reason not to, I think I’ll end up going with option 1 (the cheapest one). It should be able to run word and maple, and it might be able to do some multi-tasking.
