Travel laptop for Solidworks

I have downloaded SW on my PC in the garage, it seems to work pretty well so far. My problem is I don't have time to run the tutorials and really play with SW while I am home. I travel a lot an have some downtime in the hotels. Can I put SW on an additional machine? What would be a good travel laptop to learn SW ?

I would probably use the more powerful garage computer once I learn SW, unless the laptop can do a reasonable job. I currently don't have a laptop, (college age daughter has it) but I have a need to get one. Ideally I would use a MacBook Air or Pro and boot up Windows with Bootcamp to use SW.
I am also open to windows based laptops. I have looked at the HP Zbook 14, but it got very poor reviews on some of the SW sites. Any ideas?
Thanks

Dave

I have used SW on laptops for years. My laptops have been Dell Inspiron and Latitude models. You might be able to get a 64 bit machine as a refurbished unit from Dell for a very reasonable price. You will need a higher end machine. My Inspiron is an older model (early 64 bit machine) and it takes some time to process SW tasks.

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Originally Posted by lathropdad

I have used SW on laptops for years. My laptops have been Dell Inspiron and Latitude models. You might be able to get a 64 bit machine as a refurbished unit from Dell for a very reasonable price. You will need a higher end machine. My Inspiron is an older model (early 64 bit machine) and it takes some time to process SW tasks.

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Here, here. My "latest" laptop is a 6 year old Dell Precision M4500 with 16Gb memory. It runs SW just fine, but compared to the modern laptops you would call it long in the tooth. Bear in mind that CAD software (including SWx) guzzles compute resourses - all of them - memory, graphics, disk IO, screen resolution, CPU speed, cache memory, graphics memory, etc.
If I were looking for new hardware (I will be in a few months), I would choose the following hardware as "essential":
1. At least 16 Gb RAM (or more).
2. A high-end graphics card that supports OPENGL that is supported by SolidWorks.
3. At least 512Gb SSD (Solid State Disc).
All the other properties are in the nice-to-have ball park.
Notice that in CAD the number of core processors is not really all that interesting because CAD by its nature is serial processing (except for the graphics) and most of the time only one core will be working hard.
Hope this helps.

Part of the original posters question was if the EAA Solidworks could be put on more than one computer. Is that ok?

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Originally Posted by AB9NZ

Part of the original posters question was if the EAA Solidworks could be put on more than one computer. Is that ok?

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Yes, they were ok with it at teh press conference last year.

I'm running SW on a MacBook Pro with bootcamp. No problems so far.


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Thanks for the replies to the thread. A physician friend of mine is using a think pad by Lenovo. His IT guru won't let him use anything else, because he feels like they are bullet proof. :-)) I have talked to Lenovo and they recommended the P51s. I am looking in to that option. I haven't been in the windows world for a number of years and my last experience was with dell. The dell machines worked great, they just seemed to have a lot of extra non essential software installed that seemed to slow the boot up process. Looneybird, Thank you for the info about running SW on 2 machines. Derek, thank you for the info on running SW on a MacBook Pro. Derek how old is your MacBook Pro? Does it have a seperate graphics card ? Again, thanks for all the info!!

Dave

Hi Dave

It's a late 2015 Pro. To save memory on the Mac I have installed SW on an external solid state drive and it works with no problems.

Derek


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Derek,

Is your MacBook Pro a 13" or 15" ?

Thank you for your time.

Dave