CAD, monitor, mouse help

[BigJohno]

So I am in my second semester at design school. I am doing a lot of CAD work on my mac and have a mid 2009 15" 512 GT macbook pro powering a 30" ACD. I have parallels with XP pro running and 4gb of ram. I haven't been so satisfied with the performance. I want to know if other people are using their MBP with the 30" for design work. Would the performance be better if I was using a 24 LED screen and more ram? Lastly, what mouse are you using for CAD. I am using the Magic mouse and its terrible.

Thanks for the help.

 

[apw100]

So I am in my second semester at design school. I am doing a lot of CAD work on my mac and have a mid 2009 15" 512 GT macbook pro powering a 30" ACD. I have parallels with XP pro running and 4gb of ram. I haven't been so satisfied with the performance. I want to know if other people are using their MBP with the 30" for design work. Would the performance be better if I was using a 24 LED screen and more ram? Lastly, what mouse are you using for CAD. I am using the Magic mouse and its terrible.

Thanks for the help.

Stay with the 30" and buy more RAM. Also, for max performance, don't run CAD via Parallels.

 

[rgarjr]

Of course you can't use the Magic Mouse since it don't have a middle button.

Get a big boy, Logitech PMX mouse.

 

[BigJohno]

Of course you can't use the Magic Mouse since it don't have a middle button.

Get a big boy, Logitech PMX mouse.

I'll take a look a the Logitech. I know know the magic mouse sucks.... Great for everything else.

 

[Sneakz]

I'll take a look a the Logitech. I know know the magic mouse sucks.... Great for everything else.

Then why did you buy it? Personally, worst mouse I've ever used.

 

[snaky69]

So I am in my second semester at design school. I am doing a lot of CAD work on my mac and have a mid 2009 15" 512 GT macbook pro powering a 30" ACD. I have parallels with XP pro running and 4gb of ram. I haven't been so satisfied with the performance. I want to know if other people are using their MBP with the 30" for design work. Would the performance be better if I was using a 24 LED screen and more ram? Lastly, what mouse are you using for CAD. I am using the Magic mouse and its terrible.

Thanks for the help.

Your lack of performance has nothing to do with your lack of ram or the size of the display, it has everything to do with you running windows on parallels.

Virtualization software like parallels emulates a pc(meaning that it tries to imitate a bios, with a random crappy videocard, only as much ram as you allow it to take, and so on) so that windows can run, as a program, inside OS X, so it gets about half the system resources it could be getting otherwise.

Boot into windows using bootcamp, use a mouse with a clickable wheel(cheapest logitech piece of crap will work) and you'll improve your performance dramatically, virtually for free.