Is Pentium M suitable for Pro/E?

If you want Intel take Intel Centrino Technology - good power and lower battery "consumption" !

Intel M is OK but I recommend you buying AMD Athlon 64 - powerfull and cheap ; buy at least 1 GB of RAM !

Hope this helps !

Best Regards, J. Jarocki

As long as the processor is of reasonable speed (and probably not a Celeron), it should handle ProE with no trouble.

I would pay more attention to RAM, the graphics card, and OS. 512MB is the minimum (probably the bare minimum) for acceptable performance and 1GB desirable. Also, beware the ATI Radeon graphics card. It is virtually the only thing Dell offers in the Inspiron line, except in the lower range, and spells death to ProE. I have tried almost every hack available to make these cards work well with ProE, but have had little success. Get ready for complete, power-down system lock-ups when opening more than 4 or 5 parts simultaneously. Also, these laptops are going to come standard with XP Home, when XP Pro is best. A better choice is the GEForce graphic card, found on most Latitude and Precision M60 laptops.

Regards

Thank you for your advice and help.

In the contrary, 17" AMD 64 laptop is more expensive than Pentium M at least for this particular case due to 15% rebate at Dell. It starts around $2500 min and go up to $3000+ with similar configuration. While Pentium M and P4 will run about $2200 max. I also try other 17" manufacture such as Sony and Toshiba, their price usually in the $2700 is out of my range.

I hope that Dell will offer Nvidia card later on next year. If they do, I may have a chance to upgrade then. I do a little research and believe that many Inspiron owners have been able to upgrade their display adapter from ATI to Nvidia in the past. In the worst case scenario where Dell doesn't offer any Nvidia card, I will purchase one from M60 and try to put it in my laptop. If it doesn't work, I am still able to return the product. The OS and RAM is not a problem. Since it's easy enough to increase the RAM and install XP Prof.

By the way, I've drop ATI techsupport a line about my findings and waiting for their response. Let's wait and see what their response will be.