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New Laptop

Ditchmiester

New Member
I'm looking to purchase a new laptop for one of our employees. He primarily uses it for Autocad and CNC Programming. Any suggestions I'm looking around the 1k price range maybe a little more if its a good deal. Thanks.
 

round man

New Member
make sure you have 64 bit drivers available for all your output devices 1st or a version of windows that supports a virtual 32 bit environment to support 32 bit drivers
 

choucove

New Member
First off, for any laptop that is going to be doing any kind of design work, you need to be getting a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. The integrated graphics options out there really just will not cut it for performance design work. If you're doing 3D modeling or really serious about your design work, then you'd best be looking into a professional graphics card as well, such as the AMD FirePro or nVidia Quadro series. These do not come cheap or in cheap laptops, so it's probably not going to fit within a $1k budget.

When you're doing design work on a laptop, you need something built for high performance work on a daily basis. Your normal off-the-shelf consumer laptops will not handle this kind of demand for long before they experience failures. Three quarters of the computers we have come in my repair shop with hardware failures are consumer laptops, they just aren't built to last.

Go with a business line laptop from Dell or HP. I'd highly recommend the HP systems, we have sold dozens of HP ProBook and EliteBook laptops, I own one of each myself, and they are bulletproof systems. Of all of these laptops we have sold over the past three years, I have not had a single one fail. Their build quality seems to be greater than similar offerings from Dell and you can get a better quality piece with more options for a similar or less price than Dell Precision series laptops.

One nice feature of several of the ProBook and the EliteBook series out if you're running plotters or CNC machines is some models still have a serial port as well. These are enterprise computers built for running this kind of work daily.

And don't just take my word on it. A couple years ago when I was at the ISA sign convention in Las Vegas, I took record of what computers the people were doing demos with throughout the convention and the majority of them were running plotters, printers, and other machines from EliteBook laptops.
 

Ditchmiester

New Member
Okay, I will take a look at the EliteBook line from HP. We aren't doing any 3D modeling just 2D drawings nothing to complex but I want him to have the speed and performance to last and not be wishing he had another new laptop in a couple of years. Thanks for the info.
 
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