looking for new laptop

[Anonymous]

I am looking at either a dell or an apple, Dell Inspiron or an apple 17"powerbook. I am very aware of Dell capabilities, but know little about apple. Which is faster? Does apple have a working os for archicad. How often do I need to change an apple os? It seems from the posts quite often. Is this expensive. What advantages does apple have over pc. Any reccomendations?

[Anonymous]

Shae, I've got the apple 17" and it's great! The screen is crisp and clear and as large as my 19" monitor at work. The OS is 10.3 for archicad and I believe that apple is going to upgrade this at about 18 month intervals. Speed is an issue as the PC's right now are faster than a mac, but I am more comfortable with the mac system. That is something that you will have to decide on your own.

[Djordje]

Shae wrote:
I am looking at either a dell or an apple, Dell Inspiron or an apple 17"powerbook. I am very aware of Dell capabilities, but know little about apple. Which is faster? Does apple have a working os for archicad. How often do I need to change an apple os? It seems from the posts quite often. Is this expensive. What advantages does apple have over pc. Any reccomendations?

Shae, you considering Apple? Tut, tut ... get a Dell, dude!

Seriously now, until G5 laptops come out (if they already did, sorry!) Dell line up has lots to offer - I don't mean overpriced M series, Inspirons and Latitudes work well. I am using a Latitude for the last year, and it is still fast and nippy, 7, 8, and 8.1.

HTH,

[aahatimo]

i believe the largest notebook screen dell has is 15.4". to get the 17" you would have to go w/ toshiba, sager (& others like link has), or apple. it used to be dell came out w/ notebooks w/ the latest & greatest video cards, i think that may have changed
i am on my 2nd dell notebook, a dell inspiron 8200, & love it. pretty much lacking in great design like the ti books though.
these units are upgradeable, you can upgrade the processor, video card (to a 64meg, not 128 nvidia quatro 700) , and of course hard drive (now 7200 rpm available!). that is a great improvement over older notebooks where you were basicly stuck w/ the processor and video card.

[Piotr Dobrowolski]

I would vote on Dell (if buying , now I am using a 2 years old Toshiba ) I would not buy a Toshiba - seeing their avaliable models now...

My friend bought a D800 lately - it looks fanatastic,
wide screen - to fit info-box in AC and not loose workspace
- but do not take WXGA screen but rather the "bigger" ones or You have to make compromises with infobox in AC

It has firewire and 4 USB2 - 2 of them on the right side - important to always see a protection key !!
And it is metal not plastic - if You do not like the creaks near the hinges 😉

Best Regards
Piotr Dobrowolski

[Anonymous]

It's been a while since I was in the market for a new PC laptop, but I have found the Dell laptops too clunky and heavy without the clean industrial design of the IBM Thinkpads at the same price/performance (yes IBM is about the same cost as Dell).

On the other side, I love my PowerBook 17". Speed was an issue with AC8.0 on OSX 10.2 (Jaguar), but I am now using AC8.1 with OSX 10.3 (Panther) and find it very snappy. Using OpenGL I can work on a 3D model of a 15,000sf house including all the exterior and interior trims, doors and windows (including dentils and modillions in the cornices and rakes, and a hundred plus raised panels in the interior walls).

A Pentium 4 Xeon desktop is faster in 3D modeling and rendering than the Mac's G4. But I'm not so sure about the P4 Mobility laptop chips (which are trimmed down versions of the desktop P4, which in turn is not as fast as the Xeon version) nor the new Centrino (don't even think about getting a Celeron).

Also remember that 3D rendering is only part of what you do in ArchiCAD and ArchiCAD is not the only thing you use the computer for. I find that I am consistently more productive on Macs than on PCs (I have spent about equal amounts of time on each platform).

You also asked about system upgrades.

I recently upgraded to the new version of OSX (Panther) and it was quick and easy. This has been the pattern with all the Mac OS upgrades I have done since System 6.03. Even a complete reinstallation of the system is relatively painless (especially since OSX; OS9 is a little more finicky).

On the Windows side the general recommendation for system upgrades and repair (per IBM and all the consutants and PC experts I know) is to initialize the hard drive and reinstall everything. Due to the Windows registry system this means reinstalling all applications (and utilities) individually and resetting all the preferences etc.

Another difference I have noted is that MacOS upgrades also tend to improve performance (this has been particularly true of Panther). Windows upgrades usually increase system requirements and degrade performance so that overall it is just simpler (and maybe cheaper) to just buy a new machine with the new Windows preinstalled.

[Anonymous]

By the way, which are the options of protection keys for laptops? The G4 PB can be considered a beautiful peace of a laptop, I personally wouldn't want add anything ugly and hanging to it. Sorry to jump a bit of the topic...

[Dwight]

Do you mean ArchiCAD protection keys???

A little turquoise knob in the USB socket.

12mm x 8mm x 30mm

[Anonymous]

me again same topic. How does centrino compare with pentium? centrino pentium m 1.4 verses pentium 4-3 gig.

[Djordje]

Shae wrote:
me again same topic. How does centrino compare with pentium? centrino pentium m 1.4 verses pentium 4-3 gig.

Forget Centrino. New name for Celeron, basically.

[JCovarrubias]

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,39023985,39118912,00.htm

[Anonymous]

Djordje wrote:
Forget Centrino. New name for Celeron, basically.

I was wondering about that. Kinda expected so.