OT:laptop

Hi,
I have to get a new laptop for work,I have a fairly new one at home 1.5 celeron M (1mb cache) and 256 ram windows xp.My question is , is this laptop enough for basic plc prog and trouble shooting or will I require something faster, and would my money be better spent in purchasing more ram or a faster processor?
Thanxs in advance
Lab

I'd get more ram.

A faster CPU may make your system just a little faster, but too little ram will cause page swaps. Page swaps will slow your system down to a crawl no matter how fast you CPU is.

Don't worry about CPU speed until you have the memory fast enough where the CPU is not waiting.

I've got a year old IBM with 2ghz CPU and 2GB of RAM. At the current 'typical' CPU speed I wouldn't run less than 1GB of RAM. Get some RAM and the notebook will be more than enough for PLC work.

Does it have a serial port?
If not, then it is much harder to program with.

Is this laptop enough for basic plc prog and trouble shooting?

Yes... until about a year ago I was using a 200Mhz Thinkpad with 32mb of ram running Windows 98.

Would my money be better spent in purchasing more ram or a faster processor?

RAM... Intel sold the market on the myth that processor speed is the only thing that matters for speed... processors these days are way over-rated. On an XP system, I'd go for 512mb of RAM for comfort. A gig is nice, but totally not necessary for basic PLC programming and troubleshooting.

Memory definitely trumps clock speed in improving performance. Memory is cheap these days, so get as much as you can.

The degree of improvement depends on your programming platform. Siemens is a real memory pig. AutomationDirect.com has much more modest requirements. The trend in newer programming packages is more gee-whiz cute graphics, so they take more memory. (How much does the spinning ladder really add to productivity?)

I just got a Dell catalog with some loaded laptops with honest to goodness serial ports. Make sure you get a laptop with one!

Ram, Ram and more Ram. Get the max ram available for what ever computer you decide to get. Then using msconfig, turn off items in the start up section you do not use often. An example is Step 7. It actually partially loads and runs in the background. It will hog as much ram as you have available and yet you may not even be using the program. I unchecked all items not in use and then what I am running has max ram available.

One thing, some programs will automatically set to load up at next start up if you use them.