New Laptop

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally Posted by Brian Lesser

Gotta agree with Billfred on this one.

I also recommend iBook as well. It's strange that I wouldn't recommend the Powerbook line, but I took a good look at both laptops and saw very few differences (the biggest difference is the illuminated keyboard and audio chat available on the Powerbook). Overall, you are better off saving a few hundred dollars and go with an iBook.

However, it's a shame that the college discount only knocks $100 off the 14" model and $50 for the 12" model (10% discount?). Otherwise, it is a very decent choice for laptops.


Since you mentioned it, I did do a little searching. The closest thing I found to 3D object modeling is a program called Carrara 3D Basics 2, which can be installed on both Macs and PCs. Hopefully, this link works...

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...lm=TE967LL%2FA

for the number of features available, I'd say $100 is a nice price for it.

There are many other choices for 3d modeling in Mac like
Luxuology, Sketch Up, Lightwave, and Maya. While they might not be like inventor or 3dmax, they are pretty good.

I would also recommended a powerbook or an ibook.

If you want a wintel laptop I would recommend either an IBM or HP laptop. If you can wait, the new Intel chips are much better than the current processors especially for laptops. These new chips like Yonah will be available in mid 2006.

[Michael Hill]

He said he wanted to play games. You aren't going to be able to play many games at all with an Apple...Sorry to all you Mac fanboys, but I hate the things for gaming. So hard to customize your own system...I make fun of Austin Butler all the time on this one. He got an iBook I believe and the only game he can play on there is a mario-like game with the Linux penguin. I was like...hmm...Apple users have to resort to other operating system's games, how sad. I also joke with him and ask "You type any serious documents on that thing lately?" So...bottom line is don't get Apple, it's not worth it for gaming. (BTW, what would you do about games that required a right click? LOL) I got a pretty sweet Gateway laptop at Best Buy for about 1200. It's got an AMD64 3200+ processor, 80 GB HDD, and an ATI Mobility RADEON 9600. It can play Far Cry pretty well.

[Freddy Schurr]

Hey, good thread, question I have

My team is looking to purchase an laptop for auto mode and other team information. Anyone have ideas on how we can get a laptop from a sponsor and what type of laptop should we be looking at.

Thanks

[Wetzel]

Originally Posted by Ogre

By far, the toughest laptops are Thinkpads. They can take any abuse you can throw at them. They're the standard that other laptops are measured against.

The Toughbooks are much tougher than the Thinkpads.

I personally like my HP a lot. It is better in all but video (card and monitor(s) size) and storage space to my desktop. Only $1100 too. $2000 will buy you a lot of laptop.

Wetzel

[Brian Lesser]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

He said he wanted to play games. You aren't going to be able to play many games at all with an Apple...Sorry to all you Mac fanboys, but I hate the things for gaming. So hard to customize your own system...I make fun of Austin Butler all the time on this one. He got an iBook I believe and the only game he can play on there is a mario-like game with the Linux penguin. I was like...hmm...Apple users have to resort to other operating system's games, how sad. I also joke with him and ask "You type any serious documents on that thing lately?" So...bottom line is don't get Apple, it's not worth it for gaming. (BTW, what would you do about games that required a right click? LOL) I got a pretty sweet Gateway laptop at Best Buy for about 1200. It's got an AMD64 3200+ processor, 80 GB HDD, and an ATI Mobility RADEON 9600. It can play Far Cry pretty well.

I never said anything about being a Mac fanboy. A lot of us actually have valid reasons for switching to Macs...

As far as games go, there is a very good list of games available for Macs. Such examples include...

Doom 3
Halo
Battlefield 1942
Rise of Nations
Star Wars: Battlefront
Neverwinter Nights (and its assorment of expansions)
Age of Mythology
Baulder's Gate
Black and White
Call of Duty
Medal of Honor and all the bloody expansions
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield

Then, for kicks, lets just add Warcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Diablo II, and Starcraft. Notice that I didn't even mention their expansions yet ;D

Personally, I'm glad that a company, such as Aspyr, exists. They have helped release a lot of popular games (such as Doom 3 and Star Wars: Battlefront) on the Mac.

And as far as Right-clicking goes...

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...lm=MA086LL%2FA

Hope that helps...

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Ogre

By far, the toughest laptops are Thinkpads. They can take any abuse you can throw at them. They're the standard that other laptops are measured against.

I was just given an IBM ThinkPad by my employer. It's a T30 model -- 1.8 GHz P4-M, 512 MB, 30 GB HD and pretty nice 3D acceleration. I think it's an integrated Intel chip. It is quite a nice machine -- robust, light and runs cool, generally. I have Solidworks on it and it performs well. It sometimes crashes Solidworks, which subsequently crashes just about everything else -- but that might just be Solidworks itself. I've never had Solidworks show much stability.

[mathking]

I use both Mac and Sony laptops at work. Both are good choices. I will throw in the two cents from some friends who are software engineers / developers. They are noticing that a really large percentage of programmers at big conferences now are using Apple PowerBooks.

As for design software, VectorWorks is a mainstay program which works on Macs. It can be used for everything from setting up the lighting and sound in an auditorium to designing a gear to be made with a CNC mill. Shade and Blender are also available on Mac.

[KenWittlief]

Some of the high end computer animation programs will only run on a Mac.

The person who asked about getting a laptop for your team. If its not for the animation, then just about any laptop will do for programming the bot. If it has a USB port, its probabally good enough.

[Conor Ryan]

Mac's are Mac's you know when you want one usually, but it doesn't hurt to research.

If I we're to get a laptop under $2000 I'd be looking at the Acer Ferrari, nothing really parallels it, AMD 64 bit processor, lots of Ram, nice nVidia Go 128mb video card and lots of other stuff.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

Mac's are Mac's you know when you want one usually, but it doesn't hurt to research.

If I we're to get a laptop under $2000 I'd be looking at the Acer Ferrari, nothing really parallels it, AMD 64 bit processor, lots of Ram, nice nVidia Go 128mb video card and lots of other stuff.

The Ferarri is actually rather expensive (at least the 4005WLMi model). It's like $2050 before tax and shipping.

It looks cool, but there's better values out there. As I noted before, Acer uses the cheap 4200 RPM hard drives. To upgrade to the same size and 5400 is like an extra $80. I've also heard a ton of complaints that the ferrarri series quickly turns into a space heater as soon as you start doing anything graphic/processor intensive.

I took a quick look at a couple websites I considered when buying my laptop last year, and I came across this(I eventually ended up buying from here. 110% satisfied with my purchase).

after customizing it to the original poster's specs, it comes out to about $1950 fully loaded. The best part is that they don't charge sales tax (outside of nevada), so you save about $150.

As I noted in the thread I linked to earlier, if you don't care about having a name brand computer, I would highly reccomend buying from a company that sells laptops made by the ODM. For example, you can get any of the laptops Alienware sells, just without all the alienware branding all over it, at a significant discount. Same goes with a bunch of other models from various manufacturers.

You also get the same warranty, with exactly the same tech support as the name brands. They just thank you for calling a different company instead of Dell, Gateway, or what have you.

It turned out that I got even better tech support from the no name brand than from the mass merchants, since they're located about 30 minutes from my home. I had one very minor issue, and I drove it right over and got it back within 24 hours.

When it comes down to it, very very few manufacturers make their own laptops. I believe Apple was one (someone told me recently they don't anymore) and one other smaller company. Might as well pay less and get the same thing, with a different logo on the case

[Bill_Hancoc]

Last summer i got a new inspiron 6000 with a intel pentium M 750 1.86GHz 512Mb of Ram 80Gb HD ATI Radeon Mobilty X300 w/Hydravision. This is a great computer and i have few complaints. I am able to run autodesk 7 with little trouble (altho sum more ram would be nice) as far as gaming goes it is decent but its no powerhouse. Dell now offers this computer with a 2Ghz Pentium M and i belive a better graphics card. It is a great computer doesnt weigh too much but i suggest getting a bigger battery since it only gets about 2 hours with wifi on. For the price you cant beat it.

Originally Posted by Brian Lesser

I never said anything about being a Mac fanboy. A lot of us actually have valid reasons for switching to Macs...

As far as games go, there is a very good list of games available for Macs. Such examples include...

Doom 3
Halo
Battlefield 1942
Rise of Nations
Star Wars: Battlefront
Neverwinter Nights (and its assorment of expansions)
Age of Mythology
Baulder's Gate
Black and White
Call of Duty
Medal of Honor and all the bloody expansions
Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield

Can't forget Marathon! The entire series makes having a mac worthwhile!

[Brian Lesser]

Originally Posted by 114ManualLabor

Can't forget Marathon! The entire series makes having a mac worthwhile!

To be honest, I never heard of Marathon...

But as far as Windows computers go, Here are some ideas for specs...

A processor with at least 1.5 GHz
1 GB of RAM
(at least) 80 GB Hard drive
Video card @ 256 MB

Might not be helping, but I'm typing up some quick notes before I log off. (Need sleep)

Anyways, I hope those idea as far as specs go are useful to some degree

[KenWittlief]

I have to point out, there are some decent wireless network laptops on sale right now from Dell and Gateway for ~$600, that would be great for a student to use for all HS and most college courses

for $2,000 you could buy 3 of them, and still have $200 left over for SW!

[sirbleedsalot]

After looking reading your responses I was looking at the following laptops.
http://www.sager notebook.com/pages/notebooks/product-price.cfm or the
the hp zd8000
however if I can get a laptop for $600 that will do everything I need then I might just save some money.