Thanks for your input.

Anybody using any of these monitors:
Dell 2407WFP-HC
Dell 2407WFP
Dell E248WFP
LG Flatron L245WP
BenQ FP241W

Any input is appreciated.

If I can give you any encouragement with regard to losing weight - this worked for me after many years of being substantially oversize.

Its a question of maths:
You need about 2400 cals per day to sustain yourself (ie not add additional weight) - you use about 800 of that to sleep believe it or not. If I remember correctly every 3600 cals that you take in below what you need will lose you about a pound in body fat. That means you have to design your diet in such that you maintain a deficit intake of about 500 cals per day to lose a pound in one week. This all means that you need to understand what the calory impact of every item is that you're eating in order to be sure that you're staying on target. You can find booklets that will give you the cals associated with different portions of food. Stay away from pizza and any fried food and replace your nibbles with the best quality fruit you can find (so that it's enjoyable). Think quality and not quantity - that helps you look forward to the next meal. Your metabolism may slow down substantially so make sure you take in fibre.

THATS half the story. You will find it very difficult to lose weight through diet alone. In fact you may find that your body will try to preserve it's fat stores if you suddenly change your eating routine dramatically. You will need to burn some cals through exercise.
Think of it as a fire; food is the fuel and exercise is the flame. You need some of both to burn the fat stores. An hours walk will burn about 200cal, an hours run about 700.
Walk 2 - 3 kilometres in the morning and again in the evening and 400 cals have been eliminated from you total daily intake.

So the formula is Weight loss(in lbs per day)=
[2400cals-(Food cals - Exercise cals)] / 3600

Of course you wont see the results immediately give it a couple of weeks and you will see that this actually works. And I can tell you as improve you start to feel a lot better generally which will help you in coping with the other problem.

I want to encourage you not to give up mate. Go for it, I know of many people that have come through OK.

Look after yourself.
Toxic.

[Well not so secret really because you can derive it from many books on the subject.)

Using this formula I lost 25kg in 5 months:
D=Cal-(X+2400)
For women:
D=Cal-(X+1900)

Cal = day calory intake. [You gotta understand whatya eating mate!]
X = day calories burnt through exercise [eg. 1 hour walking = 200, running = 700]
D is daily calory surplus or deficit [more or less than what you need to sustain yourself. 2400 Cals for men, 1900 for women.

If D < 0 then you have lost weight on the day otherwise you have gained.
Pounds gained/lost = D/3600

So if you wish to loose 2 pounds a week total D for the week should be -3600 x 2.[Expect a lag factor of a couple of days and remember exercise may add some muscle bulk initially - but measured over a couple of weeks it is pretty accurate]

Of course the above is very simplistic and I can hear a multitude of dieticians shouting "glycemic index!"

• but you know what? It works!

I've had this problem for a while in Sketchup and Layout.
In Sketchup:
Sometimes when I reopen a file the shadow info associated with individual pages gets reset and everything is in the 'dark'. Using ruby to check what's going on it looks as if it resets to Boulder time which I assume is the default. This appears to happen when I have high polygon components in the file. Using the shadow sliders does not correct the problem because the location appears to be reset. I have developed a workaround that saves the shadow info to a text file (ruby script) which I use to reset the pages to their desired shadow info state.
In Layout:
Even with the desired shadow state in SU I get the dark state when using the scene in Layout. Using the sliders has no effect because the location info is obviously being misinterpreted in layout. This renders layout almost useless to me.

Anybody have a way to resolve this?

Can someone recommend software for monitoring and blocking illegal logins to a wifi network? Preferably from a well known company because I'm not sure I want to install free\shareware that monitors my network activity.

Help appreciated.

In the not too distant past craftsmen placed a descreet yet unique mark on the article that they manufactured. This was a way to identify articles made by individual craftsmen working in the same company. As time went by these marks became a way to identify works of value that could be attributed to a particular artist.

Maybe one could take a cue from history...

Tried a search with no success. - How do we post attachments on this forum?

I would recommend using an application designed for a job like this eg. Rhino.
There is a free trial that allows you to save 20 times. Enough to get a few jobs done.
If you use the rhino .skp exporter from Rino labs it will export the mesh beautifully.
Hope that helps.

Style-by-object s what I want.

Thanks for the input Daniel - that seems to do the trick.

I too can confirm that I frequently get this error with or without AA.
Model complexity & size has something to do with it. Typically things start to go wrong in the 4500-5000px wide range(aa-off) 6000-700 (aa-on).
This has happened on two machines including the latest (2.3GH dualcore/ quadro fx 1600 /2 GB RAM) machine.

Tom

Unless you need to move your work arround a lot you will get a lot more technology in a workstation for the price of a workstation class laptop. Weigh up the performance of a top end workstation with a large monitor against the cost of the laptop. Having said that the new generation laptops are very fast and you will probably not feel the need for any more power unless you have used a really top spec workstation before. Laptops that fall into this category are the Dell M6300, HP Compaq 8710w and the CAD2 Imagine[ http://www.cad2.com/workstations/laptop-workstations.html ]. [Some heavyweight workstations are made by CAD2 as well]

I personally use the Compaq and it is realy fast. [A lot faster than the 3.2GH Pentium,2G RAM,geForce 6600 PC I used before]

If you are looking at a workstation I would try and get something with at least an FX3500 card.

What is the best pricing that you can get on your target machines?

(Slightly unrelated..)
I had some concerns about using a slower dual core machine with Sketchup but I find that despite the lower processor speed working with multiple programs at the same time is a lot more responsive than on a faster pentium. This appears to be true of working with SU alone. Combined with the FX1600 card the 2.2GH dual core is a lot faster than 3GH+ pentium with geForce 6600 configuration of equal memory (2 Gig).

Also be aware that since the Santa Roza version (2007) the dualcore centrino processor can speed up single thread processes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino#Santa_Rosa_platform_.282007.29

@unknownuser said:

The Santa Rosa platform comes with dynamic acceleration technology. It allows single threaded applications to execute faster. When a single threaded application is running the CPU can turn off one of the CPU cores and overclock the active core. In this way the CPU maintains the same Thermal Profile as it would when both cores are active. Many expect Santa Rosa to perform well as a mobile gaming platform due to its ability to switch between single threaded and multithreaded tasks

We really need to develop a Sketchup benchmark script to be able to test hardware in a more scientific way. When you read the hardware tests on workstations you can see that benchmark performance on machines with similar configurations from different suppliers can be dramatically different. To throw components together arbitrarily does not necessarily guarantee a quick machine.

It illustrates the point that it is error to measure a man by his weakness or his works alone...

@unknownuser said:

Personally, I think the compound curves of a woman are the perfect form, but I can understand that others may want something different.

Well so do I for that matter, but I think you've missed the point completely...

@unknownuser said:

Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
John Ruskin

I used a midrange geforce 6600 on my previous workstation and I thought it was pretty good. I now use worstation class laptop (hp compaq 8710w) that has a quadro fx1600 card which blows the socks off the previous machine.

If I was you I would find a waranteed refurb workstation with a quadro fx3500 / fx4600 card and save the money that way.

Here is a link with some technical info:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html

@ypnos1 said:

I've been running SU and a number of rendering softwares of my Dell Precision M70 for the last 3 years.

Ypnos

Your reply is interresting because there are some refurb warrantied M70's floating arround for a couple of hundred quid. (May be an option without having to destroy the drinking budget!) What processor size are you running and are you happy with the display quality?

I have spent some time researching current models based on graphics performance and have boiled down the list to the items above. For anybody wanting to buy a new laptop this may save you some time. These are not necessarilly the most expensive machines but 3D performance wise they all feature in many current top 5 reviews. Those Alienware machines with 2 Nvidia 250MB chips are something special if money is not a problem. The HP is a top performer even beating the M90 in some tests with less memory and the 'smaller' Quadro FX1500 GPU - and therefor a slightly 'cheaper' machine.

Still hoping to hear from anybody using one of these.

Anybody here use any of the following laptops with SU?
HP Compaq nw9440 - now replaced by HP 8710w
Dell M90
Alienware Aurora 9700 or Alienware Area 51 9750 dual Nvidia GPU.
CAD2 Imagine

I'm also going through this process at the moment. I think you may find the article in this magagszine relating to low budget workstations very interresting:
http://mcadonline.com/pdf/dl_pdf/MCAD_JulAug_07.pdf
The CAD2 machine looks awesome at less than 1K. while the Dell is great value (dont forget to use the promotional code.)

By the way while your'e at it check out that HP 30 inch flat panel and the article about Rhino 4.