Choosing a laptop for specifically for P2 programming
DiverBob
Posts: 1,120
My wife and I are preparing to sell our house and then full time living in our motorhome until we decide where we want to put down roots again. I will be space limited (my programming setup and robot will be going into storage) so looking for a portable solution using a Windows 11 laptop so I can do some P2 programming while on the road.
Looking for some recommendations for a good quality Windows laptop (currently I’m using Spin Tools on a Windows 11 XPS Dell setup) and anything else needed for a system used on the road.
Any thoughts on a good laptop option or specs? This will be a good time for me to finally start fooling around with all the ‘mystery boxes’ I’ve acquired along with other fun stuff that would be perfect to connect up tothe P2!
Bob Sweeney
Comments
If you don't need top-tier specs, stick to refurbished business laptops (thinkpad and such). They're just built different and you can get them for much less than any half-decent new model.
I'm currently (alongside my desktop) using a Thinkpad X260 that I got for ~130€. This is a 2016 model, perfectly fine for everything I could possibly want (web browsing, programming (did a lot of the P2 HDMI audio stuff on here), simple games, making sketches/art with a drawing tablet, etc), solid build quality, lots of ports, built in 4G modem, very little need to upgrade to anything beyond. Save the planet, don't buy Smile that's not needed, etc.
The most demanding Prop2 activity for the dev computer is reading Google Docs and PDFs. A big screen is highest priority.
Just make sure win11 compatible
Or forget Windoze entirely.
That isn’t entirely horrible these days..
Ubuntu isn’t so bad…
I wasn’t sure what kind of specs a laptop might need as my desktop machine is fairly powerful for editing videos. Good to hear that I don’t have to run out and get a top of the line laptop just for this. I thought about getting a MacBook but I really haven’t dealt with the Mac operating system for a while and not all the P2 languages are compatible as far as I am aware. I have used Linux years ago at work but my current knowledge level with that is non-existent now so I think I should stick with Windows 11. At least I have a lot of experience with it especially when it doesn’t cooperate!
I was checking out some of the Dell laptops, they have several with larger screens which would be nice, specs look good and price isn’t outrageous.
It would be great if I could somehow run Spin Tools on my iPad, but I’m not aware of any method that would allow that.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Comment moved to it's own topic
My main PC is a Raspberry Pi which takes up for very little space.
Just make sure it has an ssd.
Jim
Yeah, if Windows, want at least 4 cores, 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD minimum...
We were out today at Costco and found a Dell laptop with 16” touchscreen, i7 processor, 1TB of storage, 32G of SSD. It had a decent price (Costco had $150 off of Dell’s price). So I picked it up. It’s more powerful than what I need but my wife wants me to load some of here machine embroidery software which needs the extra horsepower with all the graphics it uses. I’ll get it configured over the next couple of days, too bad I didn’t bring any of my Prop stuff with me to play with.
Thanks for all the suggestions, it really helped me out in figuring out what I needed to look for.
That should be great.