Laptop for engineering applications

[omnizzle]

Hello everyone,

I am currently a college student looking to buy a laptop, primarily for school work. I use programs like Solidworks, MATLAB, and AutoCAD and was just wondering what would be a good fit. I occasionally like to play games, but I have a desktop for that, so its not absolutely necessary that it can do so. My budget is around $800-$900ish.

From just a little research I was looking at the Thinkpad T400 with the upgraded video card.

http/shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=12F0696583E04D86B9B79B0FEC01C087&current-category-id=0A759CA6FAC74C46BC91C724ECD09BA7


What do you all think?

 

[cadder]

Contrary to popular belief, autocad doesn't require a fancy video card. I'm not sure about solidworks or matlab.

I use autocad and revit and bought a Dell Latitude E6500 with P9500 CPU. It will be hard to get a workstation class laptop within your budget, but you could get a consumer grade laptop with a fast processor. You'll need to do a little more research for the video though. Find out what you might need for solidworks and matlab, and find out if you can get a discrete video that will also be good for gaming. Otherwise you might have to make do with integrated graphics.