Advice on purchasing new laptop

[piano_girl]

I am planning on purchasing a new laptop. Now that I'm in grad school for engineering, I need something with very high processing speeds and good graphics. The programs I plan to run are: ProE, Fluent, NASTRAN/PATRAN (finite element), a Robotics simulation program, CAD, Inventor 11, MATLAB, and Mathematica. What is the best laptop for engineers, in your opinion?

Any help/input is greatly appreciated!

 

[Dr Transport]

A top of the line Dell, the programs you listed are memory hogs and require as much memroy as possible along with the fastest graphics cards.

 

[Crosson]

Because the reason to by a laptop is portability, you should give us an idea of what your expectations are in terms of size/weight and battery life. Next biggest deciding factor is price range.

In general I suggest you get a dual core processor (I like AMD), with 1-2 GB of ram, upgradeable to 4GB.

I hope you will also have a desktop workstation for the serious work, these are much cheaper and faster.

 

[piano_girl]

Size/weight really isn't an issue. I'm willing to pay up to $1600 for a new laptop.

If you could give me some links to specific models, that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[russ_watters]

I own a 6-month old one of these (E1505), pretty well loaded: http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/cto_inspn_e1505?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

I haven't used much in the way of 3d graphics, but it is good for processing my astrophotos.

 

[las3rjock]

I am going to repeat the question as to whether or not you will have a desktop workstation or access to a computing facility. Some engineering computational tasks (e.g. finite-element analysis) can take hours, days, or even weeks, so it would be preferrable to have a desktop workstation devoted to those tasks and to use the laptop for more everyday tasks (CAD, word processing, etc., and/or to control or access the desktop remotely). Running week-long tasks on a laptop turns it into a small, slow, and pricey desktop.

 

[ScaleMaster]

Honestly, for great reliability rating, and awesome processing speeds, my 2 labtops of choice are TOSHIBA and IBM Think Pads

 

[haki]

You can't go wrong with Lenovo ThinkPad T series, in short they pack more features than a swiss army knife with a build quality of a tank. I have T43 and I wouldn't trade it for anything other than a T60.

As Toshibas goes I strongly advice against buying a Toshiba. I know 2 persons who bought a Toshiba laptop only to have it send back for repairs in matters of months.

 

[BoredNL]

You can't go wrong with Lenovo ThinkPad T series, in short they pack more features than a swiss army knife with a build quality of a tank. I have T43 and I wouldn't trade it for anything other than a T60.

As Toshibas goes I strongly advice against buying a Toshiba. I know 2 persons who bought a Toshiba laptop only to have it send back for repairs in matters of months.

I have a Toshiba A4. I've had it for about a year and a half now, maybe even longer. I've had a few keys fall off, but there's been no hardware failure at all. 2 people with bad laptops doesn't necessarily mean that the thousands upon thousands up laptops a brand creates will be bad, or even enough of a number to create an accurate generalization.