Laptop for PLC programming

putiss

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Join Date
Sep 2015
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Czech Republic
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Hi guys,
I work as PLC programmer, especially Siemens PLC, motion and sometimes Kuka robots.
I want to buy new laptop for my work. I need work with TIA so need something powerful

Do you have some tip or your personal experience?

:oops:

Thanks
 
Do you travel a lot, do you get to work in nasty, dusty or corrosive environments? Or mostly behind a desk. That makes quite a difference in requirements.

That being said, I have never been disappointed by the Lenovo Thinkpad series. Robust, and the best laptop keyboards. T-series is great. L series is cheaper just not as robust.

Panasonic Toughbooks are even more rugged. Heavier and quite expensive, too.

Some details to keep in mind:

  • Max out on RAM if you can. At least 8 or 16GB these days.
  • Have the OS and software run from an SSD (bigger is better).
  • If you need to run many different versions of software, or software that does not play nice together, then you want a second SSD, either in your laptop or as an external disk with USB 3 connection (so make sure you have a laptop with USB 3 connector!). At least 500GB, preferably more. Use this to host multiple VM's for the software that won't play nice together.
 
As far as I know neither Dell Latitude is for an industrial environment.
To buy a real industrial laptop be ready to pay at least 3 times the price
 
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Here you go...
https://us.getac.com/notebooks/x500/features.html

Powerful and Ultra Rugged.
Our PLC group requested these for our site a few years ago, but Management shot it down quickly when they saw the price tag...
But, But, we are installing $25,000 in PLC/HMI software licenses what does $5000+ matter for the hardware to run it šŸ™ƒ
 
I use Panasonic Toughbooks for absolutley everything, cant say a bad thing about them.

1. CF-53. This has an i5 processor, 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM. I have roughly 15-20 VMs on this machine at a time including TIA 15.1 and this machine is perfectly capable of running any few VMs at once. The machine pretty much only has VMWare installed which means it boots in about 10seconds and if a VM gets corrupted or damaged- I simply take another copy off my master drive. Very efficient and robust for industrial use.

2. CF-32 and CF-19. These are older machines which I use for older stuff (STEP 5, STEP 7 etc) and has the standard PCMCIA and ExpressCard Slots which I use for the Siemens interface cards.

I keep all my Vendors software on seperare VMs to avoid any conflicts and keeps any issues with compatibility to a minimum.
 
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Unless you are working in an incredibly harsh environment, I don't think there is any great need for a rugged laptop. I tend to buy laptops with a stronger build like Dell Lattitudes because they don't flex when you carry them like slice of pizza. They are tough enough not to snap when I drop them. The main thing is to make sure you have a SSD so they won't crash (and for performance)

You are better off buying something more reasonably priced and replace it more often than be stuck with a million dollar dinosaur. With VMs it is too easy to move everything onto a new machine with minimal downtime if you destroy your laptop.
 
My suggestion would be a Dell Workstation, more durable that Latitude series.
And with TIA I would suggest running in a Virtual machine.
 
I quite like Lenovo, although the price is a bit high for what they offer and Dell is always a safe choice.

Interestingly, I had a "tough" Lenovo that fell down and split into several pieces that I then kept with sticky tape for another year or so. The Dell latitude I had previously fell more than once from the same height and kept on going. I had to replace it because the Video card died.

Which brings me to another point, having a laptop that is used in corporate environments can save your butt if you work out in the field. The Dell that failed on me, did so in the middle of the Indian Ocean... the company running the ship used Dell as well and all I had to do was swap the hard drive, install a couple of drivers and was back up and running.
 
My Panasonic tough book is a work horse. As an added bonus, nearly all of them come with a 9 pin com port that is automatically assigned to com port 0. This com port has saved me on numerous occasions when dealing with any legacy hardware.

If you are out in the field a lot you can also purchase an additional battery to keep going that much longer on top of the battery it comes with.

I purchased a refurbished unit that was most likely from the military and has not had any problems.
 
From my experience if you plan to use TIA or Step7 on virtual machine you need at least 4 core CPU, with 2 core forget about using VM unless you want become the most frustrated person in the office (I am now :D) and spend third of your work time waiting for your laptop to respond

At least 8GB of RAM, with Win 10 and TIA i would go for 16GB

decent SSD drive, 500GB minimum if you store your VMs on the host

decent battery as there is not always where to plug-in on site
 

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