how well does blender run on a laptop (do all laptops have open gl?)
im talking a £500 secound hand one (but im thinking of just saving and going on a really nice holiday next year instead.)
how safe is it to buy from a power/platnium seller on ebay?
You really have to check the specs, especially for the graphics chip.
nVidia tend to have good GL support, but I’ve only seen newer laptops with them in.
You have to read the reviews of the trader & weigh up how many past auctions they’ve done successfully & how other people who have traded with them have rated them.
ibook
nuf said ^v^
I run blender on a (now slightly outdated) laptop with a desktop chip. 'ts got a radeon, and other than being hot and heavy, runs just fine.
you forgot the short battery time 
Martin
PS: I also run Blender on a laptop. Just be sure that your 3D card has a good openGL compatibility.
Blender sucks on the sony viao. the viao cant handle it. Sony Sux.
well seeings most laptops dont have 3d suppot (in my price range) i think i’ll scrap the idea and go on a great holiday 
you forgot the short battery time
Naah, I just got a secondary battery. Now I I have 2 hours 
Blender is hard to use on laptops because of the stunted keyboards.
Nono, OpenGL dosn’t care if you have a graphics card or not it will run anything that the hardware dosn’t support in software mode. I got my start in Blender on a 200MHz Sony SuperSlim that only had a 2MB 2D-only graphics card. Blender dosn’t rely very heavily on OpenGL for much of anything so you are mainly bound by your CPU power.
Not if you turn on the “nonumpad” option. The only capability that you lose is the ability to quickly jump between layers.
i was thinking of getting myself something like the Gericom A2 …with Gentoo linux on it and everything (incl. blender) compiled from source.
the gfx-card is a ATI rage-something, which i’m rather doubtful about, and that’s mostly why i’m asking.
the battery-life with the Transmeta Crusoe processors is great
and i can always put another 256MB of ram in that little beast.
comments?
On the plus side I’m pretty sure the rage is supported under X. on the minus side, I’m pretty sure its not too fast. (btw, I’m running gentoo on my laptop, too)
It really depends on how much blending you’ll do on the laptop and how heavy your scenes are. personally I wouldn’t do anything under a radeon for gfx (radeon 7500 mobility on mine w/64 megs gfx ram, is great (for a laptop) with blender) but that’s because I know what kind of trouble I like to get into 
ATI Mobility M 4MB - that looks pretty crappy 
…i wanted to play some planeshift also …well, good bye Gericom A2 …it looked too good to be true
i don’t need a ultra-high-something gfx-card, my geforce 2 mx suits me quite well in my needs on my PC …well, i wouldn’t mind having a better one, but there’s no need for it (ATM)
well, does anyone know any long-life laptop, preferably with a Transmeta Crusoe processor and a X supported, medium-class gfx card? …oh, and preferably affordable … … 
… … i’m asking too much, aren’t i? 
I have a Compaq Presario 1277 since 1999. This machine comes with shared memory and no OpenGL support, I can’t use Blender on Windows, but works great with Linux, go figure.
Ive been using a Toshiba laptop with blender for almost one year, and it works fine… im used to the keyboard now, and to change from emulating the NUMPAD to the normal keyboard setting… the video card is TRrident CyberBlade Xp (something) 16mb. Renders go fast, and blender too, not really really fast, but fast enough for now.
dont use mac laptops. I have a powerbook and you can’t switch views unless you turn on the num lock, but then you cant use these keys becuase they get assigned to the num pad:
8 9 7 m j k l u i o p ; . / -
not to mention the one button touchpad…
As ackward as this might sound, Blendering with a touchpad is much better than none at all.
Martin
I have a 266 Mhz Dell laptop with some no-name integrated graphics system and a regular Pentium (Yes thats right…Pentium 1) and it actually runs blender pretty well. I was astonished. Its only got 96 mb of RAM too. I bought a USB mini-optical mouse from Target for $10 and it works just great for the purpose. Of course…I’ll only use it if I’m desperate…but the touchpad thing…I gave up on using that. It was impossible.
I blend with a touch-dot: it’s a little bump in the middle of the keyboard (between the G,H and B keys) that sort of acts like a joystick - it’s great for trackball-ing the scene around, but takes a bit of getting used to for everything else.
Des: that’s not too bad, I blend on a 150MHz P1 Laptop with 32MB of ram - it’s slow and I have to keep scenes as small as possible so the rendering doesn’t swap to the slow laptop HDD, but apart from that it’s still great!
Yay for blender!