Lap Top spec

I have joined a new company that uses S5, S7 and Allen Bradley. They have no means of getting on line. I have been asked to spec a laptop for this purpose and and obatin it and the relevant software. I'm very used to AB but new to S5, any relevant info on this would be helpfull, I have a book!! Any thoughts please. John

I recommend the Dell Latitude Notebook computer, either the D610 (14" screen, 1 true RS232 serial port, 4 USB ports, good battery life) or the D810 (15" screen, 1 true RS232 serial port, 4 USB ports, long battery life). I find the 15" screen necessary for these tired old eyes. The serial port is needed for connecting to many PLCs.

Each comes with Windows XP, about the best sytem for running all the software you mentioned. Also you need to customize them and add a floppy drive. The floppy comes in handy for loading old key-code disks.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/latit?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

For the Siemens, we use Dell, HP/Compaq or NEC.
The most important thing is to get a built in serial port.
All these manufacturers have some models with serial ports, but most without.

Another possibility is to get a Siemens PG panel. These laptops are optimised for Siemens and come with all the relevant comms hardware and programming software on board. They are very expensive, but once you factor in the cost of the software (and built in adaptors), it is not outragous. You could then load the AB software onto the PG, and you have what you need.

Has anyone had problems with AB & S7 running on the same PC? I have not tried this yet but people at my company have had to partition their HD's and create a totally seperate instance of windose to get the two apps to work on one laptop.

We use D610's and running windose xp sp2

I had no problems with RS logix5 and 500 and Step 7 under windows 2000 and I have not tried them together under win XP but you may have some difficulty installing Step 7 on win XP SP2, if so there is help on the Seimens website with regards to a registry edit. My company has seperate laptops for AB and Seimens software (we have just bought one with 1Gb RAM so we can run WinCC flexible). Also get a profibus DP PCMCIA card, I have had trouble with the USB to MPI/DP adaptor as it gets its power from the MPI/DP connection and not all DP devices have power on the DP port. I couldn't connect to a ET 200S profibus master module because of this.

I'm running S5 V3.0 (in a DOS box), Step7 V5.3, Step 7 µWin32 V4.0, RSLogix500 (V7) and RSLogix5000 (V10, 11, 12 and 13) on a WinXP Professional SP2 system without any problem.

It used to be a problem with older versions of the packages. Just remember to disable the 'Always Run As Service' possibility in the RSLinx launch control. That gave me most problems in the past.

Kind regards,