Where does your team get computers for Inventor?

[sanddrag]

Almost any computer made after 1995 or so can run some version of inventor, but not any computer can run Inventor well. What kinds of computers does your team use for Inventor? How many do you have? Where and how did you get them? Are these computers just for your team, or are they shared with other school classes?

[Ryan M.]

In past years, we've used, well, my computers. I usually bring both my laptop and my desktop, both of which handle Inventor well.

Similar specs, nothing special:
Desktop:
P4 2.6 GHz
512 MB RAM
Integrated video (32 MB of shared video mem...)

Laptop:
AMD Sempron 2.4 GHz
512 MB RAM
Integrated video (configurable, but usually 64 MB shared)

There are rumors we'll buy team computers this year.

[Michael Hill]

For designing the robot, we use Andy Baker's lightning fast laptop.

For CAD Animation, we use a computer lab at Ivy Tech. To render, we can combine like 50 of the best computers there.

[scitobor 617]

Our Inventor guys have had to bring their own computers. We had Inventor on one of our school computers but that did not last long because it did not run well on it.

[KnightOfIvory]

We just started the Inventor program and are having similar problems. While we were lucky enough to get three decent computers from the school, the team is expanding. We need more seats. Our school has a computer lab of older computers, and I am thinking of using them just for the creation of simple parts and small assemblies.

[mechanicalbrain]

Well i use my Alienware but since not everyone on my team can use it we get a bunch of high end computers from Raytheon i think it is.

[Kyle Love]

Our team now has computers at our shop that were furnished by IVY Tech State College. We can now to mass inventor work along with animation stuff all at the shop and not have to do it across town.

[MWTrek]

Last year we use two laptops that people brought from home. This year we bought two new laptops for the team, for a total of 5 computers.

[CJO]

Many computer corporations will donate some computers, or at least give substantial discounts, if you are stubborn enough.

In our case, HP gave us a really good price on a bunch of stuff, so we bought a half dozen good computers.

[jdiwnab]

Originally Posted by scitobor 617

Our Inventor guys have had to bring their own computers. We had Inventor on one of our school computers but that did not last long because it did not run well on it.

Correction, I was the(singular) Inventor Guy. Our school computers mostly had Inventor 5. Some were 200MHz P2/3 (I don't remember) with 256MB RAM. Others were 333MHz P3 with 256MB RAM. They ran Inventor, but were painfuly slow, especially for larger assemblies. I brought my own computer, which had Inventor 4 (that the school had allowed me to have becuase no on needed it). It was 1.9 GHz AMD Athlon, 768MB RAM. Big difference. Becuase I was now doing everything on Inventor, they let me, temporarly, install the Inventor 9 that came this year. We got new computers, but, as I am graduated and the school system, who must have absolute control over every computer the county owns, was slow putting them together, I don't know much about them. They were a bulk deal though the county and by HP, I think. It took us all last year to convence them we needed new computers. The 333MHz computers were dontated to us the previous year by a company who was clearing out their unused computers.

[vadyr]

we use the computers in the school's autocad lab, which are just your standard computer, nothing great. they are just barely able to run inventor 10, which we got for winning the inventor award at nationals (they should have given us the computer's to run it too! but we did get a laptop to run it)....but really anything should run it. im sure if your team can afford it, you could probably get computers for about 600 bucks that will run it very very very well. the only thing in inventor that is really demanding is animating in inventor. we did some animations in inventor (which was a requirement for the award). let me know if you need any help finding computers or pricing them out, i'd be happy to help you.