I hesitate to ask such a personal question as this, it being specific and of no use to anyone else, but figure I have been around a while and might be indulged.

I came into a little money and I am thinking seriously about buying a new machine. For a variety of reasons I want to get a notebook even though I know they don't have the power of a desktop at the same price.

My main problem is figuring out the issue of OpenGL and video cards. I have asked all my friends and family but they are as ignorant as I am concerning computers. As are the folks at the Big Box computer stores, the people at the small shops are scary and have no time for me.

I only want to buy a new machine at all if I can get a one that will run Photoshop 7 and Poser 6 adequately, otherwise I am better off just waiting for prices to drop further.

So here is the best I can afford:
Dell Inspiron 6000
Intel Pentium M 735 (1.7Ghz/2MB Cache/400Mhz FSB)
1Gb Shared DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms / 80Gb Hard Drive
Video Card DDR ATI's MOBILITY RADEON X300 PCI Express x16 Graphics
15.4 inch UltraSharp WSXGA+ LCD Panel
None of this means anything to me. Last time I understood computers I was typing out FORTRAN on a keypunch machine :)

So do you think that this machine will work with P6?

Thank you for your kindness.

There's the question of heat, too. People do successfully set them off the table a bit to help airflow. Looks a tad short on power to me. You want lots of FSB, processor, memory and disk speed. Looks to be about 2 1/2 years old. Shop, shop, shop.

OK, I'll try to avoid anything that starts flames.
please let us know what all this computer will need to do, aside from P6.
The shared memory thing is always bad, due to addressing issues; that machine will go up to 2gb of RAM, but it's going to cost ya.
This laptop (i think)uses the ATI Mobility Radeon X300, which i'm reading a few problem on the linux sites with it's openGL support in hardware; this could be a problem with poser 6.
If you do get it, try to swing the extra $$ for WinXP Pro; however, since this isn't a hyperthreading CPU, you could benefit from the added stability and efficiency of running Windows 2000 Pro instead, and not have to put up with DRM, activation, or other corporate sypware.
If I was going to suggest something in a sub $1000 laptop for Poser 6 to a relative stranger, it would probably be the HP Pavilion dv5029us; AMD 64-bit CPU at 1.8mhz, 1gb of ram upgradeable, dedicated 128mb ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video, 100gb drive, 15.4" widescreen.
If I was getting one myself, i would go with a AMD 64, and shop around until i found one with a Nvidia graphics card with dedicated memory; less problems overall with nvidia.
you can get a pretty decent notebook on E-bay these days for cheap, by the way; I got 2 in the last 6 months for my kids that do pretty good for about $300 each.

"For a variety of reasons I want to get a notebook even though I know they don't have the power of a desktop at the same price." cough last i saw, no notebook had the power of my desktop :)

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1333/1/583?sbss=583

I kinda doubt you would use a laptop for Poser at all, because A.) The display is much poorer quality so things are just going to look different when you load them on ta good desktop, and B.) they really lack punch where it counts. For the really simple stuff you may...want a laptop to take with you, for poking at Poser, I would suggest looking for something that just meets Poser's System Requirements... Dell Inspiron 6000 - Compaq is my favorite computer manufacturer. I love how I switch hard drives on my desktops all the time! Compaq and Dell are now the same company! Intel Pentium M 735 (1.7Ghz/2MB Cache/400Mhz FSB) - This is what will be doing your math when you're rendering in Poser. Your CPU will dictate how fast you renders complete. Unfortunetly, this is also where a laptop looks up to a desktop. To give you an idea of how well this CPU would run Poser take a look at the link I provided. It recommends you use Poser 6 with at least 700Mhz. The computer you've highlighted has 1700Mhz(1.7Ghz) 1Gb Shared DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms - This is a nice round, good starting amount of RAM Memory. RAM is place that your computer will temporarily store mathematical solutions, when it's busy preparing other equations. 80Gb Hard Drive - This is where your computer will remember everything for you. 80Gbs isn't small, but it depends on what you're doing. It's first real drawback is that it is your only one, just because a second hard drive is usually necessary for backup, if you are at all serious about your work. Video Card DDR ATI's MOBILITY RADEON X300 PCI Express x16 Graphics - PCI Express is a new technology. Much of your price tag is here. Sometimes, buying into technology right away is like eating something that's not ripe, never mind fermented! With a Laptops display screen, I would say this is even more true! But, you may be interested in knowing how much memory is in that card. It should be measured in MBs, probably something between 64MB-256MBs. Video RAM(DDR in your case) is used when you are previewing scenes and moving the cameras about, but not much of anywhere else. 15.4 inch UltraSharp WSXGA+ LCD Panel - I know a regular, hard glass, monitor is LCD. I'd bee surprised if this laptop had that. Most laptops have a vinyl/plastic screen that is soft to the touch and dull to look at. While looking for a computer to run Poser 6, I wouldn't worry about if it could run Photoshop. But, the Photoshop System Reqs are here: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/systemreqs.html Most video cards have supported Open GL for a while.

This is my machine specs: P4 3.4 GHz processor HT [no use to poser as it doesn't support hyperthreading]. 1 Gig RAM 250 Gig 7200 hard drive ATI X600 PCI Express Graphics. Personally I prefer the Nvidia cards and if I were you I'd be looking at the 600 series of Nvidia cards [does support OpenGL]. RAM, processor and Graphics card are what you should concentrate on for P6.

I happen to know that this notebook runs both fairly well. Acer Travelmate 4400 ~ $1200 USD Uses a Radeon Mobility X700. Not the best, but adequate. Here's a review... http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2484

Hi. First, thank you for your serious consideration of my questions. Everything here has been helpful. The Acer looks good but to get it to the memory and screen quality of the Inspiron 6000 would cost, I am not in the US. I have heard Acer are good because the cases are big and they basically have desktops in them so upgrading used machines isnt so hard. I now have a Compaq Presario with a 1GB RAM (shared with video), a card that has openGL, 70Mb usable disc space and a very fast 150Gb portable external drive. My Compaq has been very reliable. My desktop machine has served me pretty well with Poser 6. The 70,000+ vertices figures run slow but I manage. For the longest time I was running P5 with 256RAM the video and WinXP were using 90% of that. Somehow it ran on virtual memory and actually worked! I use the P4 and Reduced Resolution figures a lot. I only use Millennium 3 resolution figures when I have one figure in a scene which is often the case since I use Poser to replicate traditional figure painting. I know I certainly will not find a laptop that will come close to my current desktop in resources, however, I do have reasons to want a notepad for the $1000 to $1200 I have even though I know a laptop is not optimal for this kind of work. I have Parkinsonism and it is at times difficult for me to be at the computer. It would help I could install myself at on the couch or sitting up in bed when I want to just play with making digital art. Paint and brush is getting more difficult for me. I would only use Photoshop 7, Painter 8, PSP 9, Poser 4 and 6 on the new machine, no games or anything like that. I plan to use the external drive for Poser content storage. I will not use the laptop for wireless or even for Internet, only the Poser and lo-res digital painting. I realize I might have to use the notebook to put together Poser scenes and then take the .pz3 to my desktop computer for full renders. I just want to make sure I can use the P6 on the laptop and do medium quality test renders... I was concerned open the issue of OpenGL since I don't know what it is, I believe I need it for P6, and I am more concerned with responsiveness in creating compositions then with raytrace renders. I want to use Firefly but only up to that middle quality where raytrace starts to kick in. I need to go to Future Shop and see if I can figure out which machines has OpenGL. The staff has not been helpful. This Dell Direct is a few hundred less then even the refurbished machine at the retailers. Upping the Dell to 2Gb would cost $400, not feasible. So mainly it is the graphics cards that concern me... seems like gamers spend more on the card then on rest of the system. I just cant figure out the card requirements since it seems like there are a million cards out there. Things like Shared DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms and 1.7Ghz/2MB Cache/400Mhz FSB are meaningless to me and I dont understand which CPU are up to this kind of work. The most import issue for me is OpenGL and if the CPU and memory configuration will work for Poser. Acer... I have to see if I can get a good price.

Acer AS1641WLMI Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz/ 802.11b/g Wireless / 15.4-Inch WXGA / 512 MB DDR2 / 80GB HDD / DVDRW / Windows XP Home / Notebook PC w/FREE Laptop Case $1200 This is what I was able to track down in Canada. One thing I like is that the Dell comes with 1Gb Ram but I guess I could get the vender to toss pre-install an aditional 512Mb in the Acre for a $100 or so?

OpenGL is an option in P6. I personally do not use it. Scree3D is the other option. Like in P5. It's mostly about having a full color texture "preview" and its level of quality. I would get a sales kid to open up a 3D prog in the store for you. If you could up the screen size,,,that might help.

A few things that might be worth noting... The Acer I linked before comes with WinXP Pro which is typically more expensive (~ $200 to upgrade from Home) than the Home version provided with other notebooks which I would expect to pay less for because of this. If XP Home may be all you need / want then ignore this. DDR2 is still too new even though it's been around awhile. While it's faster and has more bandwith that DDR, I have yet to see a PC who's BUS can feed the RAM chips significantly beyond the capacity / speed of regular DDR. It's somewhat pointless to use DDR2 in any notebook that bottlenecks like this. However, it's a great marketing gimmick, eh. :) The more we start seeing notebooks with Front Side Bus (FSB) speeds greater than 800Mhz (big bottleneck) which also use DDR2 it start actually becoming possible to be beneficial.

when it says "shared", it means that the main computer RAM and the video card memory is the same memory; I mentioned before that it is not good because it isn't; it will slow down your system overall. dedicated memory in relation to the video card is something that is pretty common in desktops, but relatively rare in notebooks; the under $1000 HP one I mentioned earlier had dedicated video memory.
The Video card is mainly for games; poser 4, poser 5, lightwave, 3dstudio could care less what type of video card you have.
OpenGL is a feature set that a video card can have that enables it to communicate with the system; some video cards are better able to handle it than others. matrox historically handles it best, but Nvidia is pretty good.
Poser 6 uses openGL for previewing your work, as you work; it gives you more of a "what you see is what you get" experience. you don't have to use it, and allegedly Poser 6 will then act just like Poser 5 at design time. it does not speed up your final render time.
Vue requires a good implementation of OpenGL; in my personal experience, Matrox G200 handled it great, Nvidia Geforce2 was just buggy but worked, Geforce4 works great, and ATI 9700 was flaky.
Essentially, except for in vue, your video card just doesn't matter. Some graphical applications are starting to play around with using the graphic processor in the video card, but none you mention that you are likely to use (correct me if i'm wrong, here, folks; I haven't been paying intense attention to the subject for the last 4 months).
The system you mentioned, momodot, would handle things adequately. the only weak point IMO is the shared system/video memory.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread.. what is the RPM of the hard drive? Most off the shelf hard drives for laptops are 5400rpm. A 7200rpm drive will make a difference on perfomence. For Poser 6 your low MHz processors will take awhile to render. One thing I learned a long time ago with software specs, look at the requirement then have a system that is either double or even triple those. From experince I found the minimum requirements are for installation but will the software actually do anything? Try installing WFWG (win3.11) under min specs, it installs but nothing else works properly until the RAM is increased.

Yeah, I think you are right about doubling or tripling the requirement specs. Right now I am on the phone about the Acer with a sales rep from the biggest outfit in Canada... he's never heard of OpenGL but he has gone off to ask some one about it. I really do want the preview transparency feature of the OpenGL. He says that dedicated video memory is not possible in my price range. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ He just recomended a somewhat cheaper Acer to me but he still doesn't know about the OpenGL. He thinks the AMD will actually run better than the Intel so he suggested: Acer Aspire AS5002WLMi AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology ML-30 1.6GHz / 802.11b/g Wireless / 512MB DDR333 / 80 GB HDD / DVDRW / 15.4-Inch / Windows XP Home Notebook with a couple memory expension chips He said I won't get better than 5400RPM at my price, I have noticed the drive speed makes a big difference, Poser runs faster of my external than my interal drive since it has a much higher speed. I know this thing will never run like my bottom of the line consumer desktop, but I really need to be able to work/play away from my desk. I just want to make sure what I get will run Poser at all. I am trying to remeber if I had already switched to Poser 5 when I was still on my Compaq Pentium II 333Mhz machine... it didn't even have a reliable disc burner. I still can not track down how to find out if a given video card supports OpenGL.

I'll second that 7200 RPM HD is definitely good idea. However, this will generate more heat and the extra RPM will use more battery power. So, if you are given the choice between a 8-cell and 12-cell battery...go with the 12-cell. OpenGL support / performance is typically VERY awful on any integrated (shared) video card. It is my opinion that no integrated video support should be considered sufficient regardless of whether it supposedly supports OpenGL or not for any kind of 3D application. AFAIK, all ATI's Mobility Radeon or Nvidia's (Mobile) GeForce still in use "today" by manufacturer's support a minimum of OpenGL v1.5. How complete the support was implemented is a different issue. This is most often indicated by the display driver package used (in it's readme file, etc.) as provided by the graphics hardware manufacturer's website.

I'd say go for the Acer Aspire 1700 series. They use desktop components (my 2.5 year old Aspire 1703 (P4 2.66 Mhz, 80 Gb 5400 RPM disk 8 M cache, 1 GB DDR 266) outruns a younger laptop (HP/Compaq nx9010) by a factor 5 for most applications. And that old Aspire has a fairly slow shared memory graphics chip - the newer series use dedicated video memory, faster CPUs and faster disks (7200 RPM). The main advantage is that upgrading an Aspire 1700 with a larger faster disk and more memory is done at desktop prices, not at notebook prices (2-3 times as expensive). The main disadvantage is size and weight, that Aspire weighs in at a hefty 7 kilograms! When it comes to portable power for money, the Aspire 1700 series is about the best you can get. Another machine you might want to look at is IBM. A colleague of mine has an IBM notebook, ATI FireGL (professinal graphics card with perfect OpenGL support), lots of RAM, fast disk, and a very nice high resolution screen with good colors. But - it is EXPENSIVE! A Pentium M CPU at 1.7 GHz performs about the same as a regular Pentium 4 at 3.0 GHz. An Athlon64x2 4400 runs at 2.2 GHZ, and is twice as fast as a 3.5 GHz single core Pentium 4. Gigaherzes are not everything. AMD delivers much more computing power per GHz than Intel - except for the very pricey Pentium M.

Thanks. I have not yet tracked down an Acer in the 1700 series in Canada. My brother through a very conviluted proces I do not understand arrived at the conclusion the Acer 5000 series don't support OpenGL. He recomends a Gateway 7415GX AMD Athlon XP-M 3000 which he says is a "gamer"'s machine but the retailer won't upgrade the 512 memory and the slots are listed as not "user acessible". Right now I am asking him to check outa Toshiba M70-CL3 Intel Celeron M 390 1.7GHz Laptop for OpenGL support. I would send one of these guys to just get me something but they live far away. I fyou are not sick of this what do you think of Intel Celeron M 390... my brother thinks AMD is better technology. He isn't a computer guy though. The conclusion I am bring away is that there is no way to know what will run OpenGL or not and that issue seems to be eclypsing CPU and drive speed at this point.

The issue eclipses CPU speed for the lion's share!

The next really important thing you're going to want your hand on is just how big a hard drive is. RAM kinda comes around pretty fast too, but it's memory that doesn't really do much memorizing, it's always only a temporary storage area, becasue your motherboard Caches aren't big enough. You'd be surprised how well a little RAM really goes!

Drive speed won't be a factor(especially in laptops) until you start to use RAID-0 across several drives, which isn't likely to happen in this decade...maybe not the next either...could be another for laptops...

You know how sometimes, when you are moving the camera around, figures' eyes or teeth kinda pop out of their heads' a little, until you fidget with the camera a bit? That is OpenGL's fault! You stop that from happening by right clicking in the document window, and switching away from OpenGL to Scree3D!

Like I said OpenGL has been around for a while. If you look at some really cheap video cards you will note they all support OpenGL.

Message edited on: 01/27/2006 22:47

"Compaq and Dell are now the same company!" Uh, no. HP merged with Compaq in '01.

OpenGL has been around for quite some time, that's correct. Like DirectX, it exists in several versions: 1.0, 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0. OpenGL 2.0 is fairly recent, it's been incorporated in midrange and high end graphics cards since about 2 years ago. Poser wants OpenGL 1.5, AFAIK. The problem with many cheap graphics cards is that they only support OpenGL 1.0 or 1.1. Not all of them, though. nVidia is usually better at OpenGL support than ATI, probably because nVidia is more active in the professional 3D world (the Quadro series is well known) and their OpenGL knowledge "trickles down" to their consumer graphics cards. While ATI also has professional 3D graphics cards (the FireGL series), their market share in the professional 3D world is much less. If you can get an ATI FireGL based graphics chip in a laptop - go for it. Professional OpenGL support, verified against professional 3D apps like 3DS Max and Maya. It works fine and fast, guaranteed. As for the CPU, a Celeron just doesn't cut it. You're better off with an AMD Turion or Sempron. Think 64bit, you might want to be able to upgrade to a 64bit OS when Poser and other apps (finally!) migrate to 64bit.

I really apreciate the help. For some reason my brother doesn't seem concerned about me working with 512Mb RAM. I think if I remeber that I was running P6 on my desktop with 256Mb RAM before putting in a couple 512 chips. Now I am trying P6 with ScreeD and I am not picking up on the performance difference between it and OpenGL? What am I missing? I feel bad bugging you all if in the end there is no reason not to use SceeD.