Hi all,
I need to find a laptop under $1000 to run the software listed below when I'm away from the office. I've been looking online for the past week and had no luck as the laptop specs are just doing my head in. Will need to run Windows 7 and be small enough to travel with (maybe 15"). If I can get one that runs these programs easily it would be a bonus as I sometimes need to batch process large datasets 300-500MB (decent size HDD needed also). Only other requirement is an HDMI port for presentations and ability to play HD video clips smoothly from within powerpoint.
Would appreciate any suggestions of a bargain laptop optimised for these requirements.
Cheers ajrat.
Fledermaus
CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz+ / AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Memory :2GB+
Graphics Card :NVidia GeForce 8xxx or Quadro 1500+ / ATI x1900 or HD 2900XT+
Monitor :1600x1200 or greater
Caris Hips and Sips
CPU :Intel® 3.0 GHz Processor or better
Memory :2GB+
Display :32-bit (true color) OpenGL® 2.0 capable video display adapter with 128MB of memory or greater
OS :Windows® XP 32-Bit with SP3 or later, Windows Vista® with SP1 or later, Windows 7® or later
Other :USB or Parallel port for software key
The latest version of the software requires a video card that fully supports OpenGL with a recommended 128MB of RAM. We advise against the use of onboard video cards as some functionality issues have been observed.
ArcGIS 10.1
CPU Speed :2.2 GHz minimum ; Hyper-threading (HHT) or Multi-core recommended
Processor :Intel Pentium 4, Intel Core Duo, or Xeon Processors; SSE2 minimum
Memory/RAM :2 GB minimum
Display :24-bit color depth
Resolution :1024 x 768 recommended minimum at normal size (96 dpi)
Swap Space :Determined by the operating system; 500 MB minimum.
Video :64 MB RAM minimum, 256 MB RAM or higher recommended. NVIDIA, ATI, and Intel chipsets supported.24-bit capable graphics accelerator OpenGL version 2.0 runtime minimum is required, and Shader Model 3.0 or higher is recommended.
Networking :Simple TCP/IP, Network Card, or Microsoft Loopback Adapter is required for the License Manager.
your budget is really restricting since 2/3 of the listed software running on OpenGL, which means you'll need a Quadro or FireGL graphic card to get a non-sluggish 3D/processing performance, and the cheapest laptop with a quadro card fitted that I could find is around $1500.
So unless you can review your budget, my suggest would be the Thinkpad T430 or T530, which can be had for around $1000 mark. That will get you an i5 coupled with an NVS 5400M graphic card which seems to have better support for OpenGL processing than other non-quadro card.