Laptops

[JesseK]

I personally have a Lenovo with dual NVIDIA cards. It's run everything I've thrown at it from a graphics and GPGPU standpoint.

I donated my old Dell, which had a really fast Core2 Duo and a dedicated 8400M NVIDIA graphics card (purchased early '09). That laptop ran our driver's station, which had some pretty decent displays and a HUD. It also ran a suite of non-Cheesy image processing algorithms. It could also handle most of the CAD on our robots for full robot renders.

The point is, if you want to do CAD or anything graphics-related - get a dedicated card. Don't settle for integrated graphics. Whether it's Core i3/i5/i7 isn't as big a deal, IMO - but i5 is typically a decent midpoint for complex robotics-related development. If you want to make it super-fast, first burn your restore media from the HDD, then replace the HDD with a SDD (Samsung Evo 128GB is cheap-ish) and reinstall the software.

Most modern (last 2 years or so) PC touchpads are awful when they get even slightly dirty or if your fingers are sweaty. This may be a consideration if you plan to use it for a driver's station.

The team's outreach displays used to be old desktop PC's (Athlon XP's anyone?) but due to increase in media usage they'll soon be replaced by some slightly-newer-but-still-old laptops.

[Jon Stratis]

I will caution against macbooks for FRC purposes - most CAD programs are Windows only, and the driver station is Windows only. You can do it with Boot Camp or A VM on a Mac, but that requires a bit more effort to get set up than it would if you just bought a Windows box to start with.

[Rangel]

High end technical specs aside, some features you might want is a laptop with a 1080p resolution, 9 cell battery for longer life, and better than average keyboard. Also one that has both a vga AND an hdmi port is very nice for presentations. Some laptops come with one or the other and when you go to different companies or schools you want to make sure you can connect to their projector/tv unless you decide to bring your own.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

I will caution against macbooks for FRC purposes - most CAD programs are Windows only, and the driver station is Windows only. You can do it with Boot Camp or A VM on a Mac, but that requires a bit more effort to get set up than it would if you just bought a Windows box to start with.

That being said, once you go through the process a Mac can make a perfectly functional CAD machine-- 2220 uses a bunch of old-ish Macbooks from our school running Windows for CAD (we use Creo). They perform quite well and were free to us.

One of the old captains on our team ran Creo quite well on his Macbook Pro for the 2011 and 2012 seasons too.

My point being that, yes it's a bit more effort (and a Windows license), but if you really like macs it's completely possible to make it work.