On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Salgado, Paula <[email protected]>wrote:
> I'm planning to upgrade my laptop and would like to run most > crystallography programs. I was wondering if people could comment on their > current prefered options. I would prefer not to go for a Mac, so any other > alternative suggestions would be more than welcome. At least an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, at least 2GB memory, and an NVIDIA graphics chip (their Linux drivers are apparently still much better than ATI's). I'd recommend buying one with Linux pre-installed. Otherwise, spend some time Googling beforehand to see how well the model supports Linux; some popular wireless chipsets (Broadcom is the worst) are nearly unusable outside Windows, and some hard drives/controllers are problematic. (This may have improved in the past few years, but I'm not optimistic.) Also, I did a little research and it seems few laptops could deal with the > resolution requirements for HKL2000 - any thoughts on that as well? This is really still a problem? Dell's Precision "mobile workstations" have 1920x1200 resolution, but they're expensive.
