Laptop spec for CPAM and VSOM

[AdamCarlisle]

Hi all, I am about to buy a new engineering laptop for programming and demonstrating Cisco Physical Security systems. I know the spec for the VSOM workstations but has anyone got any recommendations on laptops? Is Alienware overkill or what is everyone using?

I have found my standard laptop hangs a lot and obviously video is an issue when using a crap onboard graphics chipset.

Thanks

Adam

[jfiranzi]

Hi Adam,

For laptop access to VSOM, there is no such thing as overkill.  The recommended baseline spec for workstations dedicated to VSOM is a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 1 GB PCIe graphics card, so the closer you can get to a professional graphics card for DirectX you can, the better.  For laptops that usually means a gaming system, and though I have not owned one, the Alienware systems are supposed to be quite nice.  What never works is a dedicated Intel based graphics chipset, as Intel has not concentrated efforts on competing with ATI and Nvidia for graphic horsepower.

Keep in mind, VSOM has not been qualified with IE9 yet, so in order to retain compatibility, you may need to downgrade IE to 8 (32-bit IE), Windows 7-64 is the qualified OS.

I hope that helps,

Jim

[AdamCarlisle]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the reply. I agree completely with your response about the graphics card. I didnt know about IE9 though so that was good information to have. I would like the Alienware laptop myself but I think it may be out of my budget.

Regards,

Adam

[Scott Olsen]

Mines a couple years old now, but I ended up with a Core i7 Toshiba Qosmio with a 512MB nVidia adapter.  My practical experience has been that actual CPU horsepower and number of logical threads appears to be more important than GPU horsepower (so long as it satisfies DirectX / VMR requirements) for multi-pane demos.

I've managed to eek out 6 x 720p panes and 4 x 1080p on this laptop within the profiler.

I also managed to get a functional VirtualBox XP VM passing a lot of the graphics requirements. This was before Win7 x64 support... which is now here (THANKFULLY).

The one thing I *haven't* seen working in Windows 7 x64 (in any browser) is VMD configuration via VSOM.  The "VMD window cropping" component never appears to render correctly.  I still find myself having to dual boot into good ol' XP SP3 to configure those events. 

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

[jfiranzi]

Thanks for your input, Scott.  You guys 'up north' at Bulletproof Solutions seem to find ways to push the envelope and probvide excellent feedback for product improvement.

Keep it up!

Jim

[Ed Johnston]

Hi Adam,

I am currently running a Dell Precision M4500 with a i7(2.67), 8gb ram, nvidia quadro FX 1800M running on Win7 x64 Enterprise and do not have many problems.  It has trouble with 2 1080p feeds but passes the profiler.  That being said I would match waht ever Alienware to as close to the baseline specs as possible. Get best card with the most memory that you can in the laptop. 

Curretnly IE9 isn't supported and I haven't gotten it to work reliably but IE8 works just fine.

Cheers!

Ed