Programming Laptop Suggestions

[Invictus3593]

We use an Asus G73-SW with 20gb of ram, an i7 and soon, a 32gb SSD.

Lightning fast but maybe overkill for just programming, as we use it for other things as well. I'd suggest anything with 8gb of ram and an intel i-anything. In my experience, 8gb makes a huge difference in building code and in the overall interface, as opposed to 4gb.

My only complaint about our machine is its size. Of course its great for programming and everything else, but as the driver station it's kind of bulky.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by Invictus3593

I'd suggest anything with 8gb of ram and an intel i-anything. In my experience, 8gb makes a huge difference in building code and in the overall interface, as opposed to 4gb.

I'm not so sure I believe this. You can create a full moderately-complex 3D CAD model on 4GB of RAM. I can't possibly imagine why building code would use more than 4GB of RAM. Anyone care to explain? I'm not a programmer.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm not so sure I believe this. You can create a full moderately-complex 3D CAD model on 4GB of RAM. I can't possibly imagine why building code would use more than 4GB of RAM. Anyone care to explain? I'm not a programmer.

We use Labview exclusively on both laptops and desktops, and it runs just fine on 2, 4, and 8 gb.

[Invictus3593]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm not so sure I believe this. You can create a full moderately-complex 3D CAD model on 4GB of RAM. I can't possibly imagine why building code would use more than 4GB of RAM. Anyone care to explain? I'm not a programmer.

We do high-resolution animations with Blender and Cinema4D, and it's faster with more RAM. You're right that CAD modeling does only require 4GB.

Like I said, it may just be my experience with labview. It seems like the program's UI is tough on any computer, taking a long time to load projects and initialize builds etc.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Invictus3593

Like I said, it may just be my experience with labview. It seems like the program's UI is tough on any computer, taking a long time to load projects and initialize builds etc.

How do you know it's a RAM issue and not a disk issue. What do you mean by "initialize builds" in this context?

[Invictus3593]

Originally Posted by Ether

How do you know it's a RAM issue and not a disk issue. What do you mean by "initialize builds" in this context?

For me, It has before taken the same amount of time to load on a sata drive vs an IDE drive, but you're right, I may have had a slow sata drive and a fast IDE. But adding ram that i had laying around did improve the speed, in my case:/

I mean whenever you click the Build option and it bring up a window and says "initializing build. This may take a while" for 3 minutes before the status bar moves past 0%.


What I suggested was overkill for just programming, but if you're doing high-resolution animations and rendering, it works pretty well.

[null]

High latency on your RAM could be an issue. Is every module of RAM in use of the same type and speed?

[Greg McKaskle]

The issue was generally caused by bugs in the caching of compiled files. This resulted in several hundred VIs being compiled and saved back into the database. On slow machines, this can literally take minutes -- which is why there is a cache in the first place. A number of things were done to correct for slow builds, including adding in more thorough tests to measure the build and deploy time in various configurations.

Greg McKaskle

[Invictus3593]

Originally Posted by null

High latency on your RAM could be an issue. Is every module of RAM in use of the same type and speed?

Yeah, they're two kingston 8gb cards, then I guess there's an extra 4gb embedded on the mobo somewhere because we use both sodimm slots for our 8gb cards