Well the thing is, I'm (hopefully) going to be getting a grant here. Since I would have some extra money from it, I wanted to get a laptop that would last me for half a decade or so.
A few comments on that laptop:
-With a 32bit operating system it can only address ~3.3 Gb of the 4 Gb of ram.
-Has a rather lame screen resolution
-Looks pretty swish, and has a numpad too.
But thanks a lot for the suggestions!
CAD (Computer Aided Design) software tends to be quite demanding on the system, and a workstation graphics card helps significantly. With an Intel chip-set, Solidworks tends to lag significantly making the design work take much longer than it would otherwise, and also runs into numerous compatibility issues since the software developer expects you to have a workstation card and optimizes the program to work with it.
I want a workstation video card in there since there is a lot more support for them within the engineering software community, and doing things like auto-route on the OrCAD PCB editor wont take 10 minuets to tell you that you messed something up and have go change it and wait another 10 min to have it tell you you messed something else up.
I wanted the high resolution monitor since while everything does appear smaller on the monitor, there is a lot more stuff you can work on at once, and when your working on a large design, it's nice to not have to scroll around it so much, as it leaves you prone to making errors not being able to see the whole enchilada.
If I ever intend to do any simulations on the designs I make, having something that is relatively underpowered can make things take several hours extra.
