LAPTOP OR DESKTOP

LAPTOP OR DESKTOP WORKSTATION TO WORK ON SW, AUTOCAD AND OTHERS AT
HOME.WITH DESKTOP YOU ARE, BY DEFAULT, AT DESK BUT HOW LAPTOP IS
REALLY MOBILE WHILE WORKING WITH CAD, ANYBODY WORKING WITHOUT
ADDITIONAL MOUSE? WHAT ABOUT UPGRADE PRICE AND LIMITATIONS ON LAPTOP?

 

I can't stand doing any CAD work on laptops. You cannot approach the
same speed as you can with a desktop, and then you have other
inconveniences, such as a strange keyboard, no mouse (unless you bring
one along) a small screen (where to anchor tool bars?) and other
factors. Of course, it doesn't pay well to attempt to drag around a
mid-sized tower and a 19" - 21" monitor, either.

I worked on an older Sony Vaio and found that assemblies with three
parts or more would reduce the thing to an unstable crawl--not worth my
time at all. Many laptops these days are much better than that, but
you'll find some limitations with the graphics cards available and
you'll probably also find that the same statistics/numbers for the
chips/RAM run much more slowly on the equivalent laptop.

If you have to have one, you have to have one. I don't think you'll
prefer to work on a laptop over a desktop with SW.


Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC
http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com
(Remove "GETRIDOFTHIS" from email address)

 

I appreciate Jeff's enthusiasm.

And I have as much enthusiasm for my Dell M60 (& formerly Inspiron
8000).

I've used them both with assemblies of 3-4 dozen curved parts and
admittedly that slows the 1 ghz I8000 to a crawl, but the M60 with a
much larger VRAM runs it fast enough to where I don't think of
complaining.

If you need to move around, the M60 will work fine. Working at
toolmakers, in the shop, at customers, vendors...what are you going to
do with a desktop?

If you stay stuck at your desk 8 hours a day, then why consider a
laptop. If you need both, don't skimp on the video card. Either your
laptop accepts the highest end laptop nVIDIA card or forget it.

Bo

 

what mostly I am looking for is opinions from people who are working
on laptop: pro and cons versus desktop...

 

Pros:

noise level
travelling
display
using with wlan
saving space on your desk

Cons:

price
playing with SoftQuadro

 

I have been using an HP ZD7000, Media Center Edition XP, 3.06 MHz P4 with
HT(that I leave on), a 17" screen and 2 gig ram, 80 gig 5,400 rpm drive with
the NVIDIA 5600 card. Wow..... I had been using a workstation from Xi that
was about 1 1/2 years old. The laptop kills it period. I work on huge
assemblies (5000+ parts) all the time with SW2001+ and I have NO complaints.
(other than the 14 pounds it weighs with the power supply). Everyone should
at least look at these things. You can play with then at Best Buy.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s..._name=zd7000_series&series_index=0&catLevel=2

Good Luck

 

If you get an M60, you will not be screwing around with the 128 meg
VRAM nVIDIA card, as it runs SolidWorks just fine.

If you need to travel with Solidworks then find someone nearby through
your SolidWorks VAR, and look at his M60 to judge what a high res
screen looks like and how it handles "large" assemblies (the size you
play with).

Though the 1920 pixel screen sounds like icons and text would be too
small (I thought so), it has worked out just fine, though my eyes
correct to at least 20-20.

Dell said when I bought the M60 with the 1920 pixel screen that if I
didn't like it, I could send it back for the lower resolution screen
that they offer in the M60 (1680 pixels I seem to remember).

Bo