Anyone got advice on which laptop to buy, which one to avoid? I'm looking to do CAD work with FEA, and would like as fast as I can get for $1500.
Thanks.

My advice, for the work we do (SolidWorks full vehicle assembly, Cosmos FEA) is:
-nVidia graphics card (ATI has problems with SW)
-1GB ram if you want to open the FVA and not wait 10 minutes every time you suppress or resolve a component. 512 will work, if you have the time to wait.
-Fast processor is next on the list
-1600x1200 monitor resolution if at all possible
-7200RPM HD if you can afford it

I'm using a Dell M40 that's a few years old. It's limited to 512MB RAM, so that's the main weakness.

The M50 and M60 can be had on eBay, or the refurbished section of the dell website. Mine was refurbished, no problems at all. Also, buy your RAM from somebody other than Dell. You'll save a lot of money.

something like this will do you I think...Just put another ram chip in when you get the rebates back...

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1077626575333&skuId=6418682&productCategoryId=cat01174&type=product

With the price and spec you are after, youre not going to get a very laptopy laptop - lol - I mean its going to be pretty big and battery life will be poor, but it seems the power is more important to you, and this will give near desktop performance.

Rob

We got our 1.2GHz P3, 512MB Ram, CDRW, 20GB HDD laptop from Dell (refurbished) for just under a grand, shipped - www.dfsdirectsales.com
Cool part was is had a warranty left over on it that runs till this coming January that is 'complete'- if you drop it or break it, send it back and they replace it for free. Pretty cool for a track-going laptop. Tell them you're a student team at a university and DFS will usually give you ~10% off.

I'm suprised you want to do high-end stuff on a laptop though, wouldn't you rather save money and get a big monitor and a nice keyboard and mouse to use? Also remember most current laptops run at reduced speed when under battery power.

Yeah, you can get a much faster desktop for the money, but we have computer labs full of them. The beauty of a laptop is that I designed our wheels on my bus commute last summer (FEA, 2 iterations per trip), I designed a frame in Detroit in the evenings after the Motec seminar, and I'm doing research work right now from home. A high-powered laptop that can do everything a desktop can is pretty valuable to me.

i cant believe that none of the adelaide guys have got on this topic yet. we are the most yuppie bunch of people i have ever met, i think about 1/2 the team has their own laptops. of course, adelaide uni has wireless (and free!) internet all over the uni, and there is nowhere near enough on-campus computers when it comes towards end of semester and the assignments are building up. so that makes it a smart idea to have a laptop.

i got a new toshiba protege m200 as a 21st present. its $4200 australian (US$2,876), so a bit over your price range, but anyway. the best feature about it is that it has a tablet screen. the mouse follows a "pen" that comes with the laptop. compared to using a touchpad, it is so much more easy, especially when doing work on solid edge/CAD. its an absolute dream for working with photoshop, although i doubt you will care about that.

one of the big benefits of it is that the screen can fold down over the keyboard, and using a program called journal you can write onto the screen exactly like a normal piece of paper. except you can use cut and paste, undo, and all sorts of other useful things that only come on a computer. my laptop has completly replaced notepads for me, i dont carry around anything except for my laptop anymore.

another point in its favour is the novelty value. im a hopeless procrastinator, but by making my work novel (eg. writing assignemnts on the screen) it is so much easier to do work.

btw., you need a seperate graphics card if you want to use CAD. i would recommend going for the beefiest graphics card you can find. solid edge simply doesnt work with shared video memory (at least on the 4 computers i have tried it with). you click in the bottom left corner of the screen, and something in the top right corner highlights... i have an nvidea 32mb card, but i would still recommend going for something better.

do you have wireless access anywhere? look for the centrino branding on the laptop. means it has wireless lan built in (which save a serious headfuck with wireless cards etc.). centrino also means it has a pentium M cpu, which is about twice the speed of a pentium 4 (ie. a 1.5GHz pentium M approx. = 3.0GHz pentium 4), but uses up sooo much less power. a laptop without centrino might have a battery life of 2 and a half hours, but with centrino that same laptop will have about 5 hours (these figures are guesstimates, based off what i saw when shopping around for my own).

anyway, good luck with it!

Thanks for the input everyone. I got a refurbed Dell 600m, 1.6 Pentium M with 384 ram and 30 gig 5400 rpm HD, for $1150 including shipping. Now I'm trying to use it and the fdsaing CD drive won't read reliably! Argh.

I've been looking around for a laptop lately too. So far the only manufacturer that can get both high power and low cost has been Hp/Compaq, with the HP versions costing slightly more. The best way I found was doing a custom build through their website. A Presario R300Z with Athlon-M 3000+, 1GB Ram, 40GB Hard Drive, DVD/CDRW drive, 64MB nVidia Geforce 4 440 Go with 1394 and 5 type digital media reader, 802.11b/g and 10/100 built in for $1229.99 before $30.00 rebate.

I'll have to wait a couple months to have the money, and then I'll probably have to decide on whether to buy the laptop or a nice ECU for the car.

Gug likes procrastinating?? I thought you were always hard at work. I guess that explains the 400+ posts.
I think we are just shy of 50% (9 out of 20).

Beaver,
That's a pretty sweet deal. I checked it out, you can even get it with a very high-res monitor. And the Athlon64 has been smoking on SolidWorks benchmarks.

Dell 5150
64Mb NVIDIA GeForce Go5200 video card
3.06GHz P4 with Hyper Thread processor
512MB RAM
96WHr battery

I got my laptop in December, and so far it has done everything I ask with no complaints. I am running Solid Edge and Algor for modeling and FEAs. The battery life is longer than most too.....4 hours if your just doing simple stuff like Excel, and 2-3 if you're really cranking out FEAs. Good Luck,

got a dell inspirion 8600....

1.6Ghz
1028Meg of ram
128meg dedicated graphics card
54MBps wireless
dvd burner

yada yada yada

couldnt live without it....