Mac or PC?

From: Lee, Ting Wai
Date: 9 August 2012 20:52

Hi, everyone.

 

May I ask a very general question? I am going to buy a laptop. I am going to do a lot of structural biology work on it using programs such as CCP4, Phenix, Coot and Pymol. Mac or PC, which is better? I have never installed this kind of programs and done structural biology work on laptops except using Pymol. Will these programs cause any problems when they are run on laptops? I mean, will they slow down very much or even freeze the laptops? Can the programs finish the jobs at an OK speed? I mean, maybe not as fast as desktops, but not taking too long like days or weeks.

 

Sorry if this question is stupid. I hope to have your advice. Thank you.

 

HS

 

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From: Bosch, Juergen

On Aug 9, 2012, at 3:52 PM, Lee, Ting Wai wrote:

I mean, maybe not as fast as desktops, but not taking too long like days or weeks.

Sorry that time is over when you could get a cup of coffee while refinement of a structure was running.

Any system will work as long as you have sufficient RAM, if you invest into SSD you'll get spoiled very quickly.

Modern laptops are as powerful as 3 year old Desktop machines (I'm comparing Macbook Air 2012 versus MacPro 2009, if you run Geekbench on them you get tears how slow the 16 Core cluster is compared to the 4 core MacBook Air.

Jürgen

 

Sorry if this question is stupid. I hope to have your advice. Thank you.

 

HS

 

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From: Nat Echols

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Lee, Ting Wai <> wrote:
> May I ask a very general question? I am going to buy a laptop. I am going to
> do a lot of structural biology work on it using programs such as CCP4,
> Phenix, Coot and Pymol. Mac or PC, which is better?

See this morning's thread.  Short answer: either works, just avoid Windows.

> I have never installed
> this kind of programs and done structural biology work on laptops except
> using Pymol. Will these programs cause any problems when they are run on
> laptops? I mean, will they slow down very much or even freeze the laptops?
> Can the programs finish the jobs at an OK speed? I mean, maybe not as fast
> as desktops, but not taking too long like days or weeks.

It depends on how big the structures you work with are, and what
you're trying to run.  I have a MacBook Air and it is quite adequate
for crystallography, but I've only worked with small and/or
low-resolution structures where there's no danger of exceeding the 4GB
memory limit.  (Of course, one can buy far more powerful laptops, but
the price goes up steeply.)  The important thing is *not* to buy the
cheapest PC laptop you can find, because the really low-end hardware
probably won't work very well.

-Nat

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From: HS

Thank you for your information. Actually I'm using my friend's old email account. I forgot to change the name. My name is HS.

 

HS