Limerick Astronomy Club

Hi Lads,
I'm encouraged by the responses in the meeting to the laptop question.
Its good to see people offering their time to sort this out, its much appreciated.
A number of things crossed my mind now that I've digested the discussion,.

The laptop needs to be speced like a games machines of sorts, the "all sky mode" in starrynight is very taxing on the machine, no way can the one we currently have run SN4 with "all sky mode" on, so running SN6 with "all sky mode" on would be a necessity if we're gonna put money into a new machine.
As cool as thunderbolt would be, we're frankly not going to need it, think of what this machine is going to be used for, running in club meetings and if the harddrive is 250B+, then we're not going to have any capacity issues.
The machines spec need to be focused on high cpu and high graphics ability and a reasonable harddrive size and obviously it needs a vga port.
just my 2 cents.

and whenever I think of intel protocols, I'm always reminded of rambus

Hi Dave,
just to follow-up on our telephone conversation this evening I would go with the i7 Dell XPS 15 laptop,spec as follows:

Base 2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.10 GHz)
Microsoft Operating System English Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)
Memory 6144MB 1333MHz Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM [1x4096 + 1x2048]
Video Card 2GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 540M Graphics Card
Hard Drive 750GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
Optical Devices 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
Wireless Networking Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 1000
Primary Battery 6-cell 56Whr Lithium Ion battery
Color Choice Metalloid Aluminum Cover
LCD 15.6"(40 cm) HD WLED TL (1366x768) 720p with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera
McAfee® SecurityCenter 15 Month Subscription
Power Supply 130W AC Adaptor
€ 889.49
Dell are currently running a trade in promotion so there may be an extra saving on the purchase price of the new club laptop by trading in the old club laptop.

thanks for that Tom, I agree that this laptop is top notch.
http://www.dell.com/ie/p/xps-l502x/pd
We bought a top end machine back in 2004, we got 7 years out of it, I want this one to be still usable in 5-7 years time aswell.
and considering that we can the "you know what" back aswell, it not nearly as bad a price as it looks.
I've just seen that the keyboard has a backlit option, very handy for me in the dark room doing the night sky !!!!