New Desktop workstation

Win7 would be the safe bet right now. You could upgrade to Win10, free, within the next several months once the anxiety blows over. Personally I'd just make the plunge and go for Win10.

Many vendors will sell without an operating system installed.
I no longer use Desktop computers, all are laptops. Sager has a large variety and will sell without any OS if you request. http://www.sagernotebook.com/home.php

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_5_7?url=search-alias%3Dsoftware&field-keywords=windows+7+professional+64+bit&sprefix=Windows%2Csoftware%2C349

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2053587.m570.l1313.TR11.TRC1.A0.H0.XWindows+7+DVD.TRS0&_nkw=Windows+7+DVD&_sacat=0

Peter Ehlert, post: 334120, member: 60 wrote: I no longer use Desktop computers, all are laptops.

Isn't there still a big premium to be paid for equivalent performance between desktop and laptop? I do pretty much all of my serious work (beyond answering the occasional email or browsing sites like this) at a desktop. I like the ability to inexpensively add things like a real serial port and couple of parallel ports to support legacy hardware. Adding RAM or hard drives would seem to be another area in which there'd be a cost differential.

I do own a laptop, an old XP hand-me-down from my wife when she went over to the dark side (Macbook Pro). But the only time I use it is when I need to download some old Topcon receivers that use an application Win7 can't handle.

I'm just not seeing the benefit of using a laptop as a primary workstation. Perhaps proponents can enlighten me.

Jim Frame, post: 334122, member: 10 wrote: Isn't there still a big premium to be paid for equivalent performance between desktop and laptop? I do pretty much all of my serious work (beyond answering the occasional email or browsing sites like this) at a desktop. I like the ability to inexpensively add things like a real serial port and couple of parallel ports to support legacy hardware. Adding RAM or hard drives would seem to be another area in which there'd be a cost differential.

I do own a laptop, an old XP hand-me-down from my wife when she went over to the dark side (Macbook Pro). But the only time I use it is when I need to download some old Topcon receivers that use an application Win7 can't handle.

I'm just not seeing the benefit of using a laptop as a primary workstation. Perhaps proponents can enlighten me.

Jim,

I agree. It depends on your business model, in my opinion. Being solo, I prefer the laptops, but I have gone the route of the Walmart level Dells, Office Depot Compaq's, etc.. My old desktop (XP) works great, but is 8 years old. I decided to replace it with a laptop. It is a Dell laptop from Walmart. It does great for my needs. I am not a power user by any means.

I just replaced my field laptop with a Dell I bought off of ebay for $150. My old Compaq laptop is 6.5 years of so old, and was starting to give me a little trouble.

I like the laptop options, because after being in the field all day, I would download my data, and take the office laptop into the house, and work in the living room while the wife watched TV. My office is in a separate building behind the house.

I definitely agree, you can build a powerhouse desktop for a fraction of the cost of a laptop with the same power.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m6800-workstation/pd

This laptop is what I have, it will do whatever you ask of it.

Jim Frame, post: 334122, member: 10 wrote: Isn't there still a big premium to be paid for equivalent performance between desktop and laptop? ...

It depends. The 8 year old Thinkpad T61 I bought on ebay for $100 works great (Core 2 Duo T7700 2.40GHz 4GB RAM 320GB HDD) for 99%, except the graphics in bright light are hard on my tired old eyes. I don't need more except when I use windows and AutoCAD. Then I use my Sager NP8170 (paid about $1200 three years ago)... it is significantly faster than and desktop I got saddled with in my employment.

Machine: Mobo: CLEVO model: P170HMx Bios: American Megatrends version: 4.6.4 date: 08/09/2011
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx)
Clock Speeds: 1: 2720.00 MHz 2: 2500.00 MHz 3: 2740.00 MHz 4: 2700.00 MHz 5: 2120.00 MHz 6: 2600.00 MHz 7: 2780.00 MHz 8: 2580.00 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GF116M [GeForce GT 560M]
X.Org: 1.14.3 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1080@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NVCF GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.2.2
Audio: Card-1: NVIDIA GF116 High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel Sound: ALSA ver: k3.11-2-amd64
Card-2: Intel 6 Series/C200 Series Family High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel
Network: Card-1: JMicron JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: jme
IF: eth0 state: down mac: 00:90:f5:bf:4f:c5
Card-2: Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter driver: rtl8192ce
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: e0:b9:a5:b3:1e:20
Drives: HDD Total Size: 1500.3GB (81.4% used)
1: id: /dev/sda model: ST9750420AS size: 750.2GB
2: id: /dev/sdb model: ST9750420AS size: 750.2GB

Drop the extra coin for a solid state hard drive at least a 250 gig one to have the OS and APPS installed on also your current cad files and get a 1Tb HDD for all of your archives. I am still amazed at how fast my little dell laptop boots and loads autocad since I migrated everything to an SSD. read and write speeds are 600-700 times faster that a 10,000 rpm hdd.

Randy Rain, post: 334165, member: 35 wrote: Drop the extra coin for a solid state hard drive

Have they solved the limited-write issue with SSDs? As I recall, there was a problem that reduced the lifespan or capacity over time due to the number of writes to the drive.

Depends on which SSD you get. Obviously one using SLC (single level cells) last longer the one using MLC (mulit-level cells). There are enterprise grade SSD's that are guaranteed to work for 5 years, pretty much on the same level as HDD.
What you could also do is go with two drives, one SSD for boot and a HDD for data and use it if SSD ever fails.
I personally wouldn't worry about it. The chance of HDD failling is about just as much as SSD. SSD being more limited by write number while HDD limited by the number of spin cycle it does. Its also easy and cheap to replace a drive after a few years.

I recently built a new desktop.
After years of AMD multi-core ( Athlon 64 x2, Phenom II x2) I went back to Intel.
The Haswell chip is in second generation now. The LGA 1150 socket gave me the most bang for my buck.

Intel Core-i5 4440 @3.1Ghz cpu is >$100 usd and has virtualization enabled but not SBA. ~84 watts

Asrock B85M mainboard has the PCIe 3.0 x16 mode slot. When I put in my video card I left only a PCIe 2.0 x4 mode open.
It also has USB 3.0 and SATA3. Only 2 DDR3 slots, go up to 16Gb. AHCI and UEFI bios.:good:

AMD R7 260x PCIe 3.0. A very capable video card.

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 120Gb. Solid state umm umm good! MTBF equal and surpass spinning drives. You never want to go back! :clap:

Seagate 1Tb hard drive. (in case you want to go back). And because SSD drives are nearly $1 usd = 1Gb.

DVD Burner
A 500 watt power supply (spec by video card).
Win7pro64 (supports virtualisation)

But I still have machines with XP, 98se, DOS-6.22, Linux and all the way back to Pentium 200Mhz with 5.25" floppy.:coffee:

I bought two new workstations this year, and decided to run Win 7 Pro on both of them. I haven't regretted that decision. Seems a very stable platform, and intuitive to me based on past experience with Windows.

I too am a very happy Dell Precision user, an M6700 in my case. I maxed it out with 32 GB RAM and SSD for OS and programs, HDD for data, Quadro K5000m video card. It's an amazing computer and using Dell's dock I get a real serial port as well as a parallel port. My only complaint is that using the touchpad sucks after being used to a MacBook Pro (problem solved with external mouse). It's a lot of computer for the $2k I paid on eBay for everything in like new condition. I think it was $1,300 for the computer and another $700 for all the new upgrades.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I would add one more consideration, that may be more important than you might think - 32 vs. 64 bit.

I actually upgraded my primary workstation twice in the last year or so. The first time was in response to Microsoft's announcement of the end of support for XP. I was still running Land Desktop 3 at the time, and I was concerned that it (and other legacy software) might not work on a 64 bit system, so I went with a 32 bit machine.

Later, I made the move to AutoCAD 2015 and Carlson 2015, and so didn't have as much of a concern about running the older software. But also, I started looking in to close range photogrammetry, which requires a 64 bit OS, a speedy processor, and lots of RAM. So, I upgraded my workstation to 64 bit.

I haven't installed Land Desktop 3 on the 64 bit machine yet, but everything else I have installed seems to work OK on 64 bit.

As for advice, unless you really need to run legacy software, and you can't afford the space or the $$ for a secondary XP legacy machine, etc. AND you are positive that the legacy software won't run on a 64 bit machine, I'd say

buy a 64 bit machine.

I had no luck with the upgrade to windows 10. I had to buy a new computer.

I just bought a new desktop. It's a walmart special and does everything I need. It has windows 8. 8 gigs ram 1 terabyte hard drive. I have a 32" tv for the screen. all for about 600 bucks. Without tv was about 500 I think.

I couldn't run some of my old programs but for some reason I have an older version of Acad I use to open up old jobs and it works fine. I didn't do an install I just copied the two system files into window and it's up and running like it should be. AcadR14.

I did have a problem with space in the new tower. I had to rig up my old hard drive in it. It has slots for a hard drive but it wouldn't fit. I also had to hook up my third hard drive and it is currently setting on a notepad on top of the computer. I like keeping my old hard drives and this tower won't hold them.

Have both a desktop and laptop. Found that I used my laptop more often as it is lighter and am able to bring my data to site which is a plus point. However with regards to laser scanning, I still rely on my desktop as it is still a workhorse which is able to register all my cloud data.

For my topos and engineering work, laptops are still the way to go!

Hi folks,
Thanks for all the information. It is real helpfull. I do need to buy a new desktop especially if my plan to get into UAV's comes thru. I will need something with more horsepower and is reliable to handle all that data.

It needs to be a CADD workstation on steroids. I do beleive I will hold off on the WIN 10 O/S till they get some more of the bugs out of it. WIN 7 seems to work just fine right now.

Thanks again and have a nice weekend

Bob

My first "laptop" field computer was an Amstrad PPC 640...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPC_512

I went through a lot of D-Cells on a standard 10 Day field Trip (even with "plugging into the truck" whenever possible). It was a huge improvement over the HP-41 when doing SPC Calculations, although NOT the most rugged unit!

Loyal

Bob Beilfuss, post: 335166, member: 586 wrote: It needs to be a CADD workstation on steroids

my Sager NP8170 laptop fits that bill. It is a few years old but it leaves any desktop I was issued in the dust.
you should be able to get a custom build in your hands within a week for less than $1500... I paid $1200 in 2011.

Primary drive is Programs and Data only, Secondary drive is Backup only (fully automated)
I suggest this at a minimum, more modern hardware should be "better/faster" for the same price or less.
I don't see the Ram. It came with 8gb, I added more, now 16gb but I did not notice any difference.
my specs:
peter@sager ~ $ sudo inxi -F
[sudo] password for peter:
System: Host: sager.lmde2.daily Kernel: 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: MATE 1.10.0
Distro: LinuxMint 2 betsy
Machine: Mobo: CLEVO model: P170HMx Bios: American Megatrends v: 4.6.4 date: 08/09/2011
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-2630QM (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
Clock Speeds: 1: 2507 MHz 2: 1944 MHz 3: 2297 MHz 4: 2336 MHz 5: 1554 MHz 6: 801 MHz 7: 2422 MHz
8: 2461 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GF116M [GeForce GT 560M]
Display Server: X.org 1.16.4 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
tty size: 142x24 Advanced Data: N/A for root
Audio: Card-1 NVIDIA GF116 High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel
Card-2 Intel 6 Series/C200 Series Family High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k3.16.0-4-amd64
Network: Card-1: JMicron JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: jme
IF: eth0 state: down mac: 00:90:f5:bf:4f:c5
Card-2: Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter driver: rtl8192ce
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: e0:b9:a5:b3:1e:20
Drives: HDD Total Size: 1500.3GB (72.3% used) ID-1: /dev/sdb model: ST9750420AS size: 750.2GB
ID-2: /dev/sda model: ST9750420AS size: 750.2GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 12G used: 8.6G (82%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda4
ID-2: /home size: 46G used: 33G (76%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda9
ID-3: swap-1 size: 11.47GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda5
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 57.0C mobo: N/A gpu: 54.0
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 226 Uptime: 5:22 Memory: 3333.7/16060.9MB Client: Shell (sudo) inxi: 2.1.28
peter@sager ~ $