What do you recommend for a laptop?

[Animotor]

Hi,

I'm considering buying me a laptop. I'm trying to get me the best I can afford and thus I've narrowed my selection to two models:
1. Lenovo Thinkpad W520
2. Dell Precision M4600

Both have 8Gb of memory and NVIDIA® Quadro® 2000M with 2GB GDDR3.

Does anyone have experience with these models? What do you recommend? The first one is a bit cheaper but for the latter one the seller claimed that Dell is keen to provide with the necessary drivers for different software.

[shrox]

Can you return it if it just doesn't run Lightwave? Something to ask, I was stuck with an HP DV series that would not run Lightwave.

[lardbros]

The Dell I had, (and still have but they never came to pick it back up... but shhhh!) :D Had an ATI card in it, and it was appalling in Lightwave. Tried ALL the drivers, and it was appalling... crashing constantly, and completely unusable. It was an XPS Studio 16... looked awesome, and had a lovely screen, but abysmal OpenGL. I realise this isn't too relevant, but thought i'd share my experience!

I'd steer clear of ATI if I'm honest. The replacement they gave me is in my signature, and it runs like a dream. (They didn't replace it because of the graphics card crapness though, i had other issues with the LCD going off during high CPU cycles...and after 5 visits from engineers they kept replacing the LCD with ones that had marks inside the screen!)

Good luck with your purchase, Nvidia is definitely a good choice!! :D

[kalero]

After running LW on my Vaio, if I were shopping right now (assuming the hardware is equal), I'd probably download the manuals for both laptops and find the procedure for opening the case to replace/clean out the fans

I say this because it is absolutely impossible to do this with my current laptop. I try to vacuum them as best I can from the outside, but it's just never going to be as cool as it could be. I had a Dell XPS a while back where you just popped one screw and the fans came out on a little hinge - it was phenomenal.

[colkai]

Actually, i've not long since bought a Dell Inspiron 17R (N7110) which is more than adequate for LW. It has onboard Intel HD300 with switchable discrete NVidia GeForce 525M 1GB card and is loaded with 4GB or Ram and a 500GB HDD.
Apart from a rather reflective screen, i'm very happy with it, knocks spots off my workstation. :)