Farmer
excellent, first smile of the day.
I have considered the MAC, especially as I'm getting into X-Plane a bit more and wouold be tempted to have it run on the machine that it is written.
In answer to Saintsman, primarily it would be e-mail and DVD, but I would want to run some games...maybe even some heavy maths processing software. Of course these last ones won't be a main function, i.e. Nastran/Patran, maybe even a version of CATIA or PRo-E
type software. The games would probably be things like C&C Generals, was thinking about flightsim ... would want more than keys and touchpad available though.
Are laptops capable of running the engineering software? or am I asking too much?
If so then I would just go a for a bog standard machine, otherwise I'd be intrigued to know what's out there and is good.
I'll give an example of why the dilema is there for me...
I recently bought an upgrade for my desktop, it was a graphics card. The one in the machine was an nVidia FX5200, 128Mb RAM, I bought an ATI 9250, 256Mb RAM, it turned out through many conversations and comparisons that there was next to nothing between them, I think the nVidia actually had the edge. I thought it was a good upgrade but it was more a step sideways.