You no longer need a monster Dell as your portable CAD workstation

I've been in classrooms that sport monster 17" Dell "workstation-class" laptop computers at each desk for learning CAD. The problem with 17-inchers is that they aren't very portable; the huge power supply brick Dell uses would on its own tip your luggage overweight.

With a two-week stint in Manila coming up, I needed a portable workstation of my own, with the emphasis on portable. My current laptop is a 10" netbook from LG that is fabulous for word processing (best keyboard evah!), doing the Web, running Linux, and is several years old. I knew I had a problem when I tried installing Office 2007, and the installer complained of insufficient memory!

So I went casting about to see what kind of performance was possible in something with a 14" screen or smaller, and without breaking the bank. For an example of breaking the bank, there is, for example, a 13" Sony available from London Drugs on sale for $1,350. The aluminum body and backlit keyboard are desirable, but not at that premium.

Mike's Computers had an interesting one for $599, but they were out of stock.

I tried Staples next, since the last few times I found the right computer at the right price with them, such as my current desktop, an Acer. They had three possibilities for my needs, each one $150 more expensive than the next. After some hemming and hawing, I went with the cheapest of the lot, an Acer with a sticker price of $629.

Feature List 

Here's what the Acer 3830GT came with:

• 4GB RAM, expandable to 8.
• 2.1MHz, four-core i3 CPU
  
  
• Integrated HD graphics from Intel
• A second graphics board, a 1GB Nvidia Geforce GT540M
• 13.3" screen with 1360x768 resolution
  
  
• 750GB hard drive
• Dolby-tuned speakers that sound great for such small speakers
• A proper multi-touch trackpad (by "proper" I mean that it has real buttons)
  
  
• Two USB v2 ports, and a third one that does USB v2, v3, and is always powered, even when the computer is turned off
• Bluetooth, wireless N, ethernet, 1.3megapixel webcam, HDMI and VGA output, mic, audio connectors, SD card reader.
• 8-hour battery

All this in a package that's about 1" thick, and weighs about four pounds.

It has a couple more extras that are cute. A "P" button instantly switches between power saver and powerful modes, when on battery. The battery LED is a button; when on battery, the LED is off, to save even more power; press the button to see the charge level. The battery is not removable, and so there is a small hole for "resetting" it, like pulling the battery to reset a stubborn operating system.

Price 

All this for $629, sticker price.

When I went to pay for it, however, the cash register rang up $599. The following Wednesday, the Staples flyer came out, and the price was down to $549. I immediately drove to the store to get my "price protection" refund, and the cashier rang up a sale price of $529. Sweet.

The Drawbacks

The computer has a few drawbacks. No DVD drive, although I have an external one I can use.

 Initially the Bluetooth did  not work. I followed instructions at Acer's Web site about uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, but no luck. I contacted Acer tech support, who had me do a few things, which got it half working: other devices, like my cell phone, could see the Acer, but the Acer could not see any Bluetooth devices, like mouse or cell phone.

At one point, tech support instructed me to reboot the computer, and so we lost contact. When I returned to tech support, I had a new guy, who asked if the computer is under warranty. "Yes," I said, "I just bought it today." In that case, he declared, there was no problem with the hardware, and so I would need to pay for further support.

In the meantime I found that the keyboard was a pain. The key travel is shallow, to be expected for a thin computer. But the left Shift key was split in half to make room for some French quotation marks. I kept hitting quotation marks instead of Shift.

Between the keyboard flaw, the non-working Bluetooth, and the demand for payment from Acer support, I was annoyed enough to bring back the computer the next morning. Problem was, I had spent the evening looking for a replacement, and I just could not find a laptop with better price/performance.

At Staples the next morning, the techie showed me that all laptops in Canada now have the split Shift key. This is the fault of separatists in Quebec, who demand that the rest of Canada be English-French bilingual, yet ban the use of English in Quebec. To keep Quebec in Canada, the old Liberal government gave into the demands of the separatists, and as a result we are now stuck with awful bilingual keyboards. Lesson learned: don't give into separatists.

The techie found the Bluetooth problem fascinating, and proceeded to work on it. Long story short, he spent six hours at it, finally getting to the point where he wiped the drive clean, and then reinstalled the OS and support software. It was then that he found that one Bluetooth utility program had not been present following the factory install, and so got it working. No charge.

Memory for Nothing and Chips for Free

My daughter has taken over the MacBook I bought a year ago. I was dismayed to see how slowly programs loaded, and how long the Apple product took to just even switch between applications. I figured I should upgrade it from 2GB to 4GB RAM, but hesitated at the $100 cost.

With my new computer, however, I saw my chance:

- I took the two 2GB memory cards out of my new Acer, and found they worked just fine in her MacBook. (Acer and MacBook have identical memory specs.) One memory upgrade completed for free.

- I searched the Internet for two 4GB memory cards to put into my new Acer. First site I checked was futureshop.ca, who had the memory on sale for 60% off -- $30 each. I raced to the store, but the peg was empty. I looked around the store for other memory that might work -- and found one card I was looking for on another peg, and the second card on yet another one. Last two $30 modules in my entire home town! The RAM came to $60, but then a few days later, I got a $70 refund from Staples, as noted earlier. Two memory upgrades completed for free.

So the Acer 3830GT now has 8GB RAM with another 8GB ReadyBoost. Let me tell you, AutoCAD loads just like that!

 

Comments

[John Evans]

I'm happy you are happy with your unit. I did want to point out that the capability of the unit will depend greatly on what kind of CAD you will be doing. Inventor would run ok on that setup, but AutoCAD Civil 3D, and possibly Revit would not.

The key is OpenGL support on the Quadro Graphics card. Inventor for example is tuned to run on Direct X, however Quadro's render better in all cases.

Best of luck

[Ralph Grabowski]

I installed Revit and it seems to work just fine with one of the sample building models. But then I've never used Revit before, so I don't know what to expect.

[Norm C.]

Ralph G said:
"This is the fault of separatists in Quebec, who demand that the rest of Canada be English-French bilingual, yet ban the use of English in Quebec."

I strongly resent your false accusations, and wish you bothered to check the facts.

Separatists did not demand that Canada be bilingual, a federalist Prime Minister did this (PET, remember?)

Separatists DID NOT BAN English in Quebec. Matter of fact, to this day in many Montreal downtown shops and businesses we actually have TROUBLE GETTING SERVICE IN FRENCH. In our metropolis. In our own province. How's that for an English ban.

When you Canadian neighbors visit our province and ask us directions, we go out of our way to answer you in English. You'd be surprised to learn of the political allegiance of the Quebecker who eagerly answered you with his badly accented Franglish. How's that for an English ban!

Many past PQ ministers were very fluent in English, Parizeau for example talking with a distinct British accent. A great majority of them would never endorse banning use of English.

FYI, protecting our language does not mean we want to ban English, or even that it makes all of us separatists (this is ludicrous, just look at the polls, separatism is at an all time low). Many of us are not only speaking English, but enjoy Canadian/American culture. We feel more affinity to you than to people from France. Yeah, even some separatists. Of course there are ignorant and bigoted ones, but tell me there are none in your end of the country...

And by the way, there are French speaking Canadians out of Quebec, in many provinces in fact. Officially Canada is bilingual (and again that was by a Liberal government's doing, not by separatists), and until some future government scraps that (which I'm sure will happen sooner or later considering the fact that French-Canadians are on a downslope demographics-wise) that's what you're stuck with.

In Quebec, for years we had trouble finding computer hardware with bilingual keyboards. That you are now getting them exclusively is a mystery to me, but please don't put the fault on "Quebec separatists". This is just ignorant talk.

[Marc Gibeault]

You're seeing bilingual keyboards for the only reason that computer manufacturers want only one part number for what they sell in Canada. These low-value ones at least; I can choose French-Canadian or English-Canadian keyboards for Apple gear...
But I did not expect such red-neck, racist comments in your blog. I'm removing it from my reading list and I simply won't hear from you anymore.

[Ralph Grabowski]

When one speaks out against a political movement, it is called "freedom of speach," not "racism."