Which Copmuter and What do I need

[AutoCADforDummiesGuy]

Hello all, I'm going to be starting my Civil Engineering Course at a Tech School. The talk of the internet and studies say teens going to school and collage and waht not, need computers, specifically a laptop. I was wondering if any one knew where i can custom order a laptop from a place like Pentium, or Dell, or some place? Also, I was wondering what it needs, graphic video cards and stuff? Any and all help is appiated. Thanks

 

[crystalrae]

I would make sure it had tons of RAM on it atleast 128-255 MB - and to be honest I would go with a rather good Dell laptop if you plan on running CAD. Talk to the computer service person at Dell - they will be able to suggest a good laptop for you - they should know what runs well on certain models - if they don't ask to talk to someone who does.

 

[shadow]

my boss has one of the new HP Omnibook 6000
its penti 3 750mhz 128 megs of ram and 18 gig hd and he has every autodesk product that is out with the exception of the mechanical stuff installed on it and runs like a champ it has windows 2000 and he has had it since beggining of dec of 2000 and never had a problem you might check into this

also video card wise get anything with above 16 megs of video ram and you should be good

 

[RivieraCadMan]

Normally I would say Toshiba (My preferance), but after my last laptop purchase I found that Dell dosn't solder their cpu's into the motherboard on some of their laptops. This allows future upgrading of the processor or replacement do to heat buildup. Make very sure that the model you pick has a large amount of <b>ONBOARD<b> video. At least 2MB of accelerated onboard video for 2D, 4MB for 3D. If you have shared video memory, the graphics chip has to pull from your RAM which is much slower and takes away memory from the rest of the system. I use 256 MB of RAM on my system for 2D, but my drawings get to be up around the 30 to 50 MB region sometimes so I need it. 128 MB should be sufficiant for a student. Finally don't buy a Celeron machine. Pentium, Duron, and Athlons (My Preferance) are great chips, but the Celeron usually chokes under heavy drawings and renderings.