Budget laptop upgrade for Solidworks?

[QuinTx]

My brother is in his junior year of college and the program he's enrolled in involves using a lot of programs like Solidworks, and his laptop with his i5 4210u and his 6gb of ram and intel integrated graphics is having trouble keeping up...he never plays any games on his laptop, so what would be the best option for him to upgrade for better performance?

[Jurrunio]

more memory and probably an SSD will do

[Peepnbrick]

From what I read, mate processing is handled by the CPU and the drawing of lines is handled by the GPU - if specifically those two processes are slow, then it could be those components. More RAM would help all around, as would an SSD (as the previous post said). 

 

One thing you could recommend to him is to open up and work in a typical Solidworks file he has, and then open up the resource monitor in task manager. Tell him to look at the graphs and, when Solidworks starts to slow down, take note of which of the graphs are at or near 100% usage (CPU, GPU, Disk, etc). That should instruct him on where the bottleneck is.

 

if it seems like all of the components in the laptop aren't quite capable enough, then there are a couple alternatives to a new laptop:

1. Some schools have virtual lab software that runs an instance of Solidworks being run on their servers on your computer, so you don't really need much processing power on your end - you just need to be able to "stream" it.
2. His school probably has capable computers on campus with Solidworks to accommodate people who don't have laptops.
3. There's a program called Fusion 360 that is free and cloud based - so no intense processing has to be done on his computer. I've never used it myself, but I hear it's quite comparable to Solidworks.