Solidworks on a Laptop - Recommend?

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.

message

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.

appreciated.

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