Solidworks on a Laptop - Recommend?

I am looking for recommendations of laptop models that will run Solidworks
2004 well. A current customer is upgrading his laptop and needs the newer
features in Solidworks 2004. We are currently looking at the Dell M60
Mobile Workstation with 1 GB RAM and the Quadro FXGo 1000 Video chipset.
Any suggestions pro or con will be greatly appreciated.

Dave Acker
Win-Data Services

 

I realized that I did not have my information set up on this account for
posting.

David Acker
Win-Data Services
dacker@[no-spam]win-data.com

 

Stay with the M60 you won't regret it.

Regards,
Scott

 

Thanks Scott - I assume you are using one? Any quirks to be aware of?

Dave

 

I personally don't have one. There is an AE that works here that has one,
and I'm always asking about his M60 and he says it runs circles around his
new desktop and the amount of problems he has ran into are minimal. Most of
the issues he has ever seen are Driver issues and I repaired quite easily. I
do know there are several people on this forum that use Laptop's and I
believe there are a few of them using the M60 or the M50. M50 is just as
good but older.

Regards,
Scott

 

Thank again Scott - that seems to be the consensus I've heard so far. You
answered my question about drivers too.

Dave

 

I have a Dell M60 and love it. you can save a ton of money if you shop the
dell refurbish site. Same warranty and components. you just can't custom
config the laptop. The only down side is it's power hungry. the batteries
does not last very long (about 2 hours)

 

Thanks for the reply. I thought the M60 used a Centrino chip and the
Centrino's were supposed to have much better battery life?

Dave

 

David,

It uses a Pentium "M" with a 1mb L2 cache

Mark

 

Ok, forgive my ignorance, but the configuration page on Dell's Web site had
the Centrino logo near the networking section. I noticed the Pentium M
listing by the processor but I thought the 2 together meant it uses the
Centrino which has longer battery life. Am I confused (easily possible)?

Dave

 

I think the cpu used less power, but the video card seem to be the power
hog, of course I'm running high resolution and have not optimized my machine
for power, it's optimized for speed.

 

I think "M" is a subset of Centrino technology, but I'm not up on it.

I use an M50, which I think is just a common or garden 2GHz P4, and it's
hard on batteries if I do tricky stuff. It's hilarious starting an FEA
(Cosmosworks) calculation. Twenty seconds into the calculation, and the dual
fans come on at full noise (Kompressor!) and hot air POURS out the back.
Quite nice place to put your hands on a winter's day (here, down under, we
don't heat buildings quite as warm as you're used to in the US of A so we
take whatever we can get)

If you need to get a 12V adapter for your M60, Lind seems to be the best
bet. (Dell don't do one). The Lind adapter can detect if it's in a plane
rather than a car, in which case it throttles back to 70W (which is as much
as the outlet is rated at) and tells the computer not to be so greedy. Given
that a SwissAir 747 crashed into the North Atlantic 'cos the entertainment
systems in First Class were drawing too much from the harness and started a
fire, that seems an idea not entirely lacking in merit.

I did the cheapskate thing (the adapter in question is worth $$$$) and
bought a second hand Lind Air-Auto adapter for a Latitude C, which only ever
puts out 70W. My M50 pretends its throat has been cut, giving me doleful
messages saying it's having to make economies to get by, but basically it
seems to work fine.

 

Thanks for the info on the power consumption. It's an interesting point
about the difference between optimizing for power or speed. And I will
certainly keep in mind the suggestion about the Lind adapter. Definitely
don't want to add to power load on an aircraft any more than necessary.

Dave

 

Centrino's have better battery life than P4, and now as of today, the
new Banias Centrino to 2 ghz is on the Dell website and is supposed to
be even more power efficient.

I've used the M60 for 6 months on SWks 2003SP5 and have not had one
glitch. I would expect the newer chipset to be better yet.

By the time I added the extras I want the M60 winds up @ $4600.

Power isn't cheap.

Bo