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Advice on a laptop for college

G

ghidu

Senior member
I need laptop, no more than 1000$ to run the programs listed in summary. What do you advice? Thanks
 
No more than $1,000? At decent speed? Well, let's hope that you're not planning on doing anything too complicated with those.

That being said, I do use AutoCad and ArcView on a Dell 600m, 1.7 GHz Pentium M -- with 1.25 GB of RAM, it's doable. Still not the fastest thing in the world, but, if you can save the bigger files for a more powerful computer, you can at least get some work done on it.
 
Originally posted by: AtlantaBob
No more than $1,000? At decent speed? Well, let's hope that you're not planning on doing anything too complicated with those.

That being said, I do use AutoCad and ArcView on a Dell 600m, 1.7 GHz Pentium M -- with 1.25 GB of RAM, it's doable. Still not the fastest thing in the world, but, if you can save the bigger files for a more powerful computer, you can at least get some work done on it.
Click to expand...

OK, I'm willing to spend more if necesary. Should I look for a faster CPU or more RAM or both. Thanks.
 
My thought is that RAM is the most important with those apps--especially with big layer files in ArcView. I understand the whole budget thing, but I would definitely try to play around with some of those programs on someone else's laptop to get a comparision as to what the speed will be like.

I've found that when things are slow and annoying as anything for me, other people find it to be quite responsive--and vice versa. So, the more you can get some hands on experience, the happier you'll be.

Also, there's a big chance if you're using this for some intro work, the autocad and arcview stuff won't be horrible--it's not like you should have to be doing anything that involves geocoding 1,000,000 addresses, or examining huge autocad files for a class. No comment on MatLab, though -- haven't had to deal with that in my work.
 
Oh, and of course, it's generally cheaper to buy the laptop with the base RAM and then upgrade it yourself with RAM from a decent deal online.
 
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