Last year our team’s primary (only) computer was a loaned Dell tower from a team member. Fun days when the graphics card was knocked loose and the thing wouldn’t boot on the first day of regionals. Had to run with borrowed laptops from team members and Green Machine. Fun stuff.
This year, our team’s looking at getting an eeePC (or some other type of netbook). For programming mainly, CADing will probably be done on school PCs or another loaner or something.
The purchase of the netbook is contingent on this: Can it run on something like that?
NI claims Labview needs a Pentium 4, and I’m not sure how the Atom stacks up against it. Can anyone confirm if Labview can run on the eeePC and if so, how well?
Lugging a eeePC to regionals would be much easier than lugging a tower + CRT monitor.
I’m not sure if they are different for the version we are given…
I can’t imagine it’d run very fast, which I would find very annoying.
Why not buy an actual laptop? A good one will last your team for years. I really recommend against netbookish computers for doing major work… and I consider labVIEW to be major work.
This page references the processors as “or equivalent” and the atoms in the newer eeePCs are usually 1.6GHz, meaning they’d fall some where in the middle between the minimum requirements. Meaning, yes it’d would most likely run, but rather glitchily, especially if you were trying to run it as a dashboard.
I second this recommendation. A netbook is nice because it is portable, but since LabVIEW is a very graphical language, every bit of screen space is valuable, and performance is a must. Buy a laptop with a good carrying bag and good battery life and it’s practically as portable as netbook, in my experience, even with a 15" screen.
We’re mainly looking at the netbook option because our team doesn’t have a lot of money, and we’ve got a fairly sizable ($500) personal donation that we’re considering turning into a laptop instead of cash. Because apparently we’d have to try to get the school to approve our laptop purchase if we bought it, but if the item itself is donated, it works better. And we don’t really see them approving the purchase (our district kind of sucks. And is also going through major budget cuts.)
We are having alot of problems with our school also, not so much on the budget side of things, but more on everthing else. they require us to have a staff member present at all times, and with only one staff member as a team mentor, it is hard to have him all the time.
Anyway, you can get a decent laptop these days for $500, with a decent sized screen/memory/prossesor. I would stay away from netbooks. (they where only originaly made to surf the net), hence the name, so they arent really that fast on anything else.
with that said, i have talked to some people who have run photoshop CS4 on an MSI wind netbook, so i guess all is possible.
I don’t have access to an Eee, but in another project we demonstrated LV 7.1 running on the Intel Classmate, which is in the same class and even less capable. In reality, LV is a pretty straightforward app, and will run on most VMs and low end machines. As mentioned, the speed will suffer based upon the RAM and the CPU. You may want to look at refurbished or used laptops as well. As others mentioned, a big monitor and extra memory sure are nice.
my teams desktops were mostly donations and have P4 processors with anywhere from 256 mb to 512 mb. they work ok for labview, my laptop (dual core with 3 gigs of ram) it runs like a dream.
the major thing you need is lots of screen space, high resolution. even on my 15 inch screen 1280 x 800 resolution, its still a little hard at times. have you thought about a thinkpad or something?
Its hard at times to connect the lines on my screen so on anything smaller its unimaginable.
I have an Eee PC I intend to put labVIEW on as soon as my USB IDE drive enclosure comes in. Mine is the 4GB 701 version. Not the surf version. It also has a RAM upgrade; it now has 1 Gig of RAM instad of 512 Megs. I wouldn’t use it for a dashboard, but I think it will be able to program fairly well. I’ll report back as soon as I have it running.
