Suggestions for Mobile Workstation Laptop

[artdutra04]

Long story short, the screen on my old laptop died yesterday, so now I'm looking for a new laptop. Basically I'm looking for an engineering/business laptop for light to moderate CAD use, presentations, and other 9-to-5 work. Specs that I've been looking for:

At least 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo
Must support up to at least 4GB RAM, but can come with less
NVIDIA Quadro or ATI FireGL workstation GPU, minimum 256 Mb
WSXGA/WXGA+ (1440x900) or higher screen resolution
Hard drive should be at least 120 Gb, 7200 rpm
DVD+/-RW drive
Minimum 3 USB ports, 1 Firewire and/or eSATA port
WiFi card with b/g/n support

Right now I'm looking at Dell M2400, M4400 and Lenovo W500, T500, although I'm leaning towards the M4400 due to the inclusion of a middle mouse button on touchpad (any SolidWorks user worth their salt would appreciate that!). Any input on these or similar laptops would be much appreciated!

[pyr0b0y]

I personally like the M4400, although I do currently have the LenovoT500 and I think it is a pretty powerful computer. I also use Solidworks as well as Pro|Engineer and I find that it works really well with both software. I actually prefer CAD on my laptop over my desktop........maybe that's because I'm always at Starbucks working at CAD at 6am!

Have you thought about just looking for a laptop with a really good processor and then upgrading the RAM and HDD? By the way, I believe Vista x86 only reads 3GB of RAM, so you will need x64 architecture unless you are going with XP

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by pyr0b0y

By the way, I believe Vista x86 only reads 3GB of RAM, so you will need x64 architecture unless you are going with XP

All common* 32-bit versions of Windows NT 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0—including XP and Vista—will support at least 4 GB of RAM and two processor cores. The 3 GB issue comes from the way memory is mapped for devices with onboard memory (like video cards).

It's mostly a driver issue, nowadays: nobody wants to rework video driver code to be sensitive to whether Windows was booted with the /PAE switch, and could therefore map the video card addresses outside of the 4 GB region. Instead, they just assume that nobody uses the top of the memory range, and reserve many addresses there for direct memory access to the video card, preventing that space from being addressed as system RAM.

*There are stripped-down versions of XP and Vista designed for some overseas markets, and not available in North America. And I'm not sure if there are extra limitations on the embedded versions.