personally i much prefer a tablet, to me it feels more elegeant and less bulky than a tablet laptop. I've always found that tablet laptops are to cumbersome to really be of any use, but then i've never really made a concerted effort to get used to them.
Hope that helps to an extent.
Being the innocent young thing that i am, i've not a clue what your talking about 
anyway, heres a quick model i knocked up...
EDIT:
woops, i forgot to resize the image before uploading it so it didnt upload on the initial post.
although not as lyrically talentd as darth, i'd like to propose this as the next modelling challenge.
the challenge: model your favourite thing in the world! can be anything you like (within the bounds of normal decency), extra points awarded for imagination, all round impressivness and cool renders.
Closing date: 1st of february.
jsut to say it again, very cool indeed, you gonna render it when its all done?
surely its not so bad that you can't divide by 2? 
fair enough, i'll be quiet for the moment as i know very little aobut what google have done with SU (thus the thread!), but from what you're sayign it doesn't sound very good.
rem
if you think like that solo, you'll never get anywhere though, as long as you dont fork out for an absolute top of the range machine you sould be ok.
All the machines so far look pretty good, so i'd just go for the one that provides your prefered balance between cost and performance.
good luck!
stu, i'd hardly call sketchup "one inept fiasco after another." As far as im concerned SU is a dammed good piece of software, and even better, it's free. I dont know what more you could ask for really.
rem
was it very well known before google bought it?
being a realative young 'un, i now bugger all about what sketchup was like before v5, and indeed before it was bought by google. So have there been a lot of major changes? did google completely alter the software or is it pretty similar to the pre google days? do you tink tis become better or worse? etc.
rem
i would have thought the best way to do it would be to specify the number of edges on the coin as the number of ridges. You could then draw in one ridge and use the rotational array tool (holding ctrl when you rotate, then entering x20, or however many times you want the rotation to repeat.) to get riges all the way round the circle. thne just push/pull the whole thing into a coin.
hope that makes sense,
rem
can't you do this with the 'intersect with model' tool? could you explain the difference to me, if there is one. thanks
rem
i tihnk a forced update is fine for tihngs like this, mostly bug fixes etc, but onyl when it works! seeing as it obviously isn't for a lot of ppl i tihnk they should pull the upgrade and get it working properly before they let people download it again.
granted, but you get its by 1 get 100 free at the puppy store, so youve got 101 puppies.
i wish i didnt have as much work to do...
thats an interestign point you make about using a tablet. i've got one but i've never really thoguht of it as a way of gettign ideas down quickly, mainly because i haven't yet found a piece of software that allows ou to do this.
I also find when you pick up a pencil and draw somethign, it seems a lot more tangibile than soemthing you've done on a computer, perhaps it's just me 
so what do you all prefer for doing quick sketches and ideas? SU or the good old fashioned pencil and paper?
personally im a fan of the pencil just because its quick and more styilistic, but thats probably just because im not very good with SU.
