Build me your ultimate work laptop

stretch_af

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Join Date
Mar 2011
Location
Drinking in Wisconsin
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So my IT department is finally gonna allow me to get a new laptop. Does Rockwell software perform better on different computer brands than others? Not that I'm gonna get what I want, buts it's nice to dream big. It would need to run a VM because of the old stuff we have. Also we have every version of RSLogix running in the plant, so that's fun. o_O (Yes: PLC5, SLC, 5000 version 13 through 31)

Umm yeah have fun
Thanks
Justin
 
Honestly, I've seen Rockwell perform great on low end machines and I've seen it perform like garbage on high end machines. Get any modern core i7, 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD and you'll be fine.

I have basically that (a few years old), FTVSME 10, Logix5/500 and Logix/Studio 5000 v13-v32 in a 32bit W7 VM with ~4GB of RAM, runs just fine.
 
I have a Toshiba satellite P875 that's 7 years old.
17.4 " monitor, 24 gb ram 1920 x 1080 resolution.
1 tb ssd c drive and i'm considering adding a second for the d drive.


I have learned this.
c drive - 500 gb
d drive 1 tb
the c drive only has the installed software.
the d drive has the vm's and working files.


I use vm workstation player - fixing to buy the pro license.
all my software is on vm's and have had no issues.


Warning ! do NOT put Norton anti virus on the pc, it doesn't play well with ab software.
try to keep the IT group as far from the unit as possible.
you will need admin rights to install the software.


hope this helps.
james
 
I have a Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 with I9, 1tb ssd, 32 gigs of ram, 4k display and stellar everything.

It's literally drop protected, this is necessary as we don't have a severe shortage of empty shelf-space on our plant floor.
 
It's literally drop protected, this is necessary as we don't have a severe shortage of empty shelf-space on our plant floor.

Hopefully their drop protection quality improved from the F1 model from back in the early 2010's.

My first thinkpad dropped from about one meter and split into a bunch of plastic pieces. Still possible to put it together with tape and it ran, but considering the normal Dell I had previously never complained from similar drops was odd.
 
I have a ThinkPad P52 with VM for a few old PanelViews..
Works great with no issues..
The think pads have been great for me in the past....
 
Another Lenovo fan here. Have a new p1 with a 15 inch screen. It’s much lighter than my old T550 that was a 15 inch as well. Go all SSD, No reason to use conventional HDD anymore. A few hundred dollars more for solid state is saved in a few days from lost labor waiting in the PC to do it’s work. Mine has an I-7 and it runs everything fine. If I have multiple SFC routines open and I try to edit one I sometimes get fatal errors but that’s probably a Rockwell issue.
 
SSD over spinning disks for sure. If you can do high speed M.2 drives over SATA SSDs, even better. I'd recommend at least 1TB if you're doing VMs, the split 500GB/1TB option listed above seems like a decent setup to me.


However much RAM you think you need, see if you can double it. You'll probably be stuck with the laptop for a while.


Note that most PLC software I've heard of is pretty much single threaded, which means that you often don't get a ton of speed boost from newer mega core/lots of threads setups. If I had the choice, I'd choose a CPU with faster single thread performance, but maybe only 2 cores, than a 8 core behemoth that has a slower clock speed. I dunno how much that trade off actually is available in the market, though.
 
I run a Dell Precision M7730. Slightly spoiled with power
You may also want to support VM drives
Can support up to 4 M2 drives, I am running 3 (1TB , 500GB, 500GB)
32GB of ram

This is my 3rd Dell Precision is 9 years, so they last pretty good and are durable. I travel to industrial sites world wide, about 40% of the year. I would only be at 2 but the last one got destroyed by my airline on a trip.
 

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