Well my laptop died today. I’ve been using Lightburn for a couple years now and I feel as though I’m pretty efficient with it - my business is growing pretty well now and I have two CO2 laser machines. But I’m not very knowledgeable about computers. I have a 17" laptop with 32G RAM, 2TB SSD and I forget what else. So I need a new laptop PRONTO! Can anybody provide recommendations for how much RAM, memory and speed I need to run Lightburn and my CAD program (Dassault Systems Draftsight)?
I think the better question is how much computer do you want?
LightBurn will run on some pretty low powered hardware. Pretty much anything modern will run it fine, and that would be in the range of at least 8GB RAM, a mid range processor like an i5, and SSD’s are good.
For CAD you may also benefit from dedicated graphics, more than a faster processor. If it only says “Intel Graphics”, that would be basic, but if it says Nvidia, for example, then that would be better dedicated graphics.
Now if you’re me, then you have a laptop with an i7, 32GB RAM, and SSD, and a main workstation with a 3700x processor (AMD i7 equivalent/ better), 128GB RAM, many drives, and multiple monitors. Both computers have dedicated graphics.
Lightburn doesn’t take much computer resources. Find out what’s good for your CAD program and Lightburn will be golden.
Rule of thumb; take the CAD “minimum system requirements”, increase the CPU to the next-higher level of processor (I3-> I5, I5->I7, etc.) and double the RAM.
Go beyond that, if you aren’t using the machine for anything else, and you are just throwing money away.
Why do you need a new laptop “pronto!”? Is something not working as well as you wish? If the laptop came with 32GB RAM and 2TB out of the box, it probably has a pretty beefy CPU as well. Maybe you are chasing the wrong problem.
You can get a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an i7 processor and 32 Gig with a huge SSD drive for under $300 on Amazon, That is way more than you need but it works great. Spend the money you saved a couple nice 24 inch monitors and a really good wireless mouse and keyboard.
Thanks so far everybody. What happened was something with the battery or charging system in my laptop. The battery is dead and it won’t charge. Had some guys at Staples and at Geek Squad look at it. Geek Squad said they don’t work on Dell anymore. I’m in a bit of a panic because I have jobs to get to! With my laptop, it could be the battery, or could be the motherboard depending on who you ask. I dragged out my old desktop computer, but it’s old and slow. Might get me by for now though. Problem is, I opened some older Lightburn files I had saved on an external hard drive, downloaded my LB license key, and the drawings are all jumbled up; some elements inverted, some mirrored, some items simply shifted out of alignment.
Thanks for the tip Allen. I really want another laptop, but here’s what looks like what you’re describing I found on Amazon. Is the graphics card suitable?
I’ll give that a try. I’m not even sure it’s the battery; One of the Geek Squad guys thought it was the “board.” (Motherboard I suppose.) Worth a try though. I would imagine if it was a bad battery it should still work with the power cord connected, but it won’t.
My Dell is from 2005, none of the kids want it and grandchildren think it served in WW2 …
It is usually never online, windows7 is never updated and LightBurn runs great with this computer. (4 gb ram)
$400 is high for that machine, you should be a able to find it for less that $300. You really want one that has an SSD drive even if it is a bit smaller, adding additional storage latter is very easy and cheap. But starting with the Windows OS on a super fast SSD makes everything better.
Well Rick, removing the battery seems to have done the trick…for now! With the battery removed I can power and operate my computer, though it seems to be running slowly. I got a new battery ordered and Amazon says delivery is tomorrow (we’ll see about that). Hopefully I’ll be up-to-speed again tomorrow. In the meantime, back to work on a custom laser-cut wood flat topographic map.
In the future, looks like I should be shopping for another laptop. The one I have now is Dell Inspiron 17" 5000 series (32GB RAM, i7 processor 1.8 GHZ, 2TB HD, 256GB SSD, says AMD Radeon GPU).
Tell you the truth, even when this laptop is running normally, sometimes Lightburn seems a little slow (takes several seconds to open and save my larger files - up to 40MB for not even my largest files). Also, my main CAD program Draftsight crashes somewhat often if I’m working on a large file.
I know a proper desktop is another economical option, but the laptop is VERY handy because I can use it when I travel or in other spaces in my home.
If it’s slower then you are used to, it may be running in “something is wrong” mode with the battery removed. The new battery may put you back where you want to be.
II don’t think it’s the laptop specs that are giving you trouble.My system is ~80% the CPU (hard to make a direct comparison) and 1/4 the RAM and it is quite happy running both Lightburn and my CAD/CAM…
You definitely want a spare computer in case this one decides to give up, but throwing money at a higher performing system isn’t necessarily going to give you the results you might be expecting.
By the way… Now that you have the laptop back up… BACKUP! Copy all your files to somewhere safe. Backup your machine settings, fonts, and Lighburn settings, too.
40mb files will take a bit of time to store, and if they contain bitmaps, those will add time (compression). We have a new project file format that we use for auto-backups and the art library that we may switch to for the main format, as it’s about 1/3rd the size and 3x faster to load & save.
Thanks Rick and everybody. All my files are on my laptop on the 2TB hard drive. The programs (Lightburn, Draftsight, etc.) are on my “C” drive - SSD. I have most of my files backed up on an external HD also (but haven’t backed up in awhile - doing that today).
Some of the time is internal - the time it takes to convert the LightBurn project into the formatted XML document for saving, not the actual writing to disk. The newer format I mentioned above changes the structure for the most commonly occurring data types (nodes and primitives) which makes reading and writing them dramatically faster, and stores them in a more compact form.
Both computers have dedicated graphics.
