jpb Veteran   Posts: 168 Joined: 5/11/2005 Location: Brown Deer, WI  User Profile | With OT being a 32-bit app and not designed for parallel processing, just about any modern laptop will work. I agree with Jim to go with an i7. My preference would be to go with the current gen of the CPU (Gen 7 or Gen 8 as of today). It may be hard to find a Gen 8 yet. Gen 9 of the i7 will have the Meltdown fixes incorporated but it won't be out until late 2018 with the first laptops probably coming Spring 2019. I'd also go with a 256 GB SSD. OT does a good job moving most things to memory, but I've observed differences between my HDD based systems and my SSD based systems. SSD will shave a few minutes off a 15 minute run. A good base set of memory for today is 8GB. You can certainly get away with 4GB if you don't plan to virtualize any instances of OT with something like VMware or Virtualbox. I've run OT in up to 3 virtual machines under VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) with each VM defined with 2GB ram on an HP Spectre: i7-5500U (5th Gen) 8 GB Ram 256 GB SSD The limitation here is both RAM and cores - this CPU is a 2 Core CPU with 2 threads per core, giving it 4 logical cores. For virtualization cores and threads matter. But if you are only going to run one instance of OT, then it won't matter much. As for monitors, another option in addition to what Jim mentioned with the USB adapter, certain monitors permit chaining. So, you connect your laptop to the first monitor (commonly with HDMI or Mini-Display port -- 2 of the newer output ports instead of the old VGA) and then you connect the first monitor to the second monitor with another pair of cables. The monitors have to support this chaining of course. Taking a quick look at dell.com, you could take a Dell XPS 15 and tweak it to have an i7 vs an i5 and upgrade the Windows to Windows Pro for about $1,460. Or a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 with a tweak to the OS to Windows Pro for about $760 (note that this one has an i5 8th Gen CPU - to get the i7, you'd need to move to the Gaming version with more memory for about $1,050). The gaming machine would be a monster for what you said you were looking for (but not quite the monster Jim described his system to be). [Edited by jpb on 4/17/2018 8:39 AM] | |
