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Ideal laptot for a "poor" student

bob_dylan

New member
Hi everyone. I am a student from the Czech republic and i am going to get a new laptop(primarly for Autocad, Inventor 10 and for Pro Engineer W2 and W3) I have pretty much decided which one i am going to buy but need a little help. My 2 choices are: Asus F2j - 1Gb Ram, Core duo 2.4, Ati x1400 Graphic card and a maximum resolution of the display is 1400x1000. the second laptop is asus A6t- Turion 64x2, 1Gb ram, the max resolution is 1280x800 and it's graphic card is Nvidia 7600.
MY question is: should i choose Asus F2j(better display but worse graphic card) or Asus A6t(worse display but a really good graphic card).
I know that there are better laptops on the market but i cant simply afford a laptop more expensive than +-1500bucks.
Thanx for your replies and advices. I would appreciate if you told me somethin about your laptops and how well Pro Engineer runs on it.
Thanks again. Bob_dylan
Edited by: bob_dylan
 
Firstly you didnt need to mention "poor"... Stating "student" automatically means you are poor. (Trust me, I know too)

I do not know the models you mention so I cant recomend. The core duo is a better CPU then the AMD though. 1280x800 is fine I reckon.

Id make sure you get 1x1GB rather then 2x512MB as you will wanna upgrade the RAM to 2GB very quickly.

Both those machines will run it well enough for a student, maybe the Intel one a bit better due to CPU.

To answer your question, I think GPU is more important then display, but the CPU is more important then both of them.

Have you considered Dell online?
 
Well, of course i have looked for some Dell laptops but i havent found any around 1500dollars.is there any you could recommend me?
 
No I cant recomend any to you, Im un informed of laptops.

I occasionally run Pro/E on a Pentium M 1.8, 512MB ram, Ati 9600. It can run the program but as soon as you start doing assemblies over 10 parts or basic FEA itll be very slow and gives me the sh*ts. I believe this is because of the CPU, and partially due to the ram.

Read around here a bit as theres alot of laptop discussions, although your budget will not get you a "good" laptop for Pro/E.

My point is anything will run Pro/E, but your budget determines how well. Take the advice I gave above about component priorities and choose your laptop based on that.

Can you consider a desktop?


Edited by: Vesh
 
go dell referb. A good cheep laptop for students is the dell 9200 I have 2 of them and overall happy. Now the dell m90 is a bad ass.

Dell referb is your best bet for under 1400 bucks

My daughter is in the cz republic. I got to visit soon. What school do you go to? While I am there maybe I could do a free workshop to the engineering students there. I have been doing that quite a bit latley in the states.

Purdue - Michigan Tech ...




Edited by: design-engine
 
Emmmm Laptops! I guess I could say a thing or two about these, but the
models mentioned, I have not a clue.

Currently I am running Pro-E Wildfire 3, Mechanica, Granta CES, Moldflow,
ANSYS and host of other pure engineering applications (Fluent to be
added shortly) on, wait for it, an Apple MacBook Pro. Yes here is an
engineeer suggesting using a Mac, and its not a joke. To be truthful I
would not ever consider another PC based machine (unless they improve
considerably). I rarely have a system crash, even though I am running
windows as my second OS.

No viruses, no crashs, and shear pleasure to use. I know these machines
are a little on the expensive side, but, the software that ships as standard
with the Mac OS is unreal. For a student it adds untold flare to all
assignments, and projects and everyday you discover something new.

I know that the engineering world will buck at the idea of these systems,
but believe me, they need to be looked at. Bounce over to apples website
and check out the specs. And yes engineering software runs like a dream
on them!
Edited by: keithvaugh
 
ATI graphics cards are notorious for use with Pro/ENGINEER. I would always suggest trying to go for an Nvidia chip. Pro/ENGINEER seems to be very unstable on machines with ATI graphics cards - I know from experience. The more graphics RAM, computer RAM the better, and get the fastest CPU you can afford. I would also make a suggestion that Windows 2000 is superior to Windows XP in terms of performace. By Microsoft's own admission Windows 2000 is a faster operating system than XP.


Phil
 

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