Any laptop with pentium 4 will do the job. Need 512M or more for memory, 40GB or more for HD
Ebay is agood place to look at
Don't buy a new one with the OS installed. Install by yourself so you can learn and it's cheaper
If you are looking for UNIX then FreeBSD is the best and also cheap, if you meant Linux then CentOS which is more or less renamed version of RedHat Enterprise linux is the way to go.
Windows is not free, never has and never will be. Since its a laptop you can get an OEM version which is cheaper. Try not to buy Windows in eBay as there are many fake products floating and you don't wanna spend on something that is not original.
Let us know your budget so that people can suggest appropriately.
I was worried as few of my frnds recently bought Toshiba and some other compnies through some vendors and they encountered few problems like screen blackout .... and have sent the laptop back to vendor!
I am upgrading my laptop and I am about to buy an Apple MacBook pro. The Mac OS X is just a nice GUI built on BSD unix. Now Apple use intel chipsets, using bootcamp, you can run Windows XP or the bugtastic Vista as a dual boot system. Or you can use parallels and run them both at the same time in a virtual machine. So my advice is buy an Apple, very nice hardware, lovely keyboard, cool looking, and have the best of both worlds.
Hii
Dell is the best as far as I can say from my experience..... No problems at all, ubuntu 6.06 runs really smooth plus there are a lot of eda tools made for ubuntu..... google them....
regards
I am upgrading my laptop and I am about to buy an Apple MacBook pro. The Mac OS X is just a nice GUI built on BSD unix. Now Apple use intel chipsets, using bootcamp, you can run Windows XP or the bugtastic Vista as a dual boot system. Or you can use parallels and run them both at the same time in a virtual machine. So my advice is buy an Apple, very nice hardware, lovely keyboard, cool looking, and have the best of both worlds.
I am upgrading my laptop and I am about to buy an Apple MacBook pro. The Mac OS X is just a nice GUI built on BSD unix. Now Apple use intel chipsets, using bootcamp, you can run Windows XP or the bugtastic Vista as a dual boot system. Or you can use parallels and run them both at the same time in a virtual machine. So my advice is buy an Apple, very nice hardware, lovely keyboard, cool looking, and have the best of both worlds.
I have an Apple machine and they are certainly not toys. There isn't much EDA software for them, but they typically aren't used in this market.
That doesn't mean the OS isn't good. At work, I knew a few eingeers who loved Mac OS so much they used as their desktops and used X11, which runs great on Mac OS to access the EDA tools.
Getting back on topic:
dozy_walia, Cadence internally uses IBM ThinkPads running RHEL 3 or 4 when they want to run software on laptops. Since RHEL is sort of expensive, I would get CentOS instead. I recommend T or R series ThinkPads with 2GB of RAM.
You can buy any laptop for this application but if you want to run cadence in a good performance i recommend you to be at lest 1G Ram and dual core processor with 4M cache.
but about Linux I think the most stable distribution is RHE 4 but it's not free.