How well do you think labview 2012 sp1 would work on a surface pro 3?

[erfigge]

I am looking at getting a something new to replace my 6 year old latitude laptop with I currently use for all my labview development.  My computer spends the majority of its time docked.  I was looking at the surface pro 3 tablets from microsoft, they have i7 processors with 8 gig of ram and a 256 gig hard drive.  I was wondering if anyone has actually installed this on a surface pro 3, or had any thoughts on how it would actually work?  I'm not worried about the mouse etc as brought up in another post.  It will spend the majority of its time docked and I can have an external mouse.  

I just want to know if it will really drag and I will be better off geting a real laptop, or if the surface pro 3 would work as a development machine.

Thanks,

Eric.

[billko]

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@erfigge wrote:

I am looking at getting a something new to replace my 6 year old latitude laptop with I currently use for all my labview development.  My computer spends the majority of its time docked.  I was looking at the surface pro 3 tablets from microsoft, they have i7 processors with 8 gig of ram and a 256 gig hard drive.  I was wondering if anyone has actually installed this on a surface pro 3, or had any thoughts on how it would actually work?  I'm not worried about the mouse etc as brought up in another post.  It will spend the majority of its time docked and I can have an external mouse.  

I just want to know if it will really drag and I will be better off geting a real laptop, or if the surface pro 3 would work as a development machine.

Thanks,

Eric.

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I'm not sure what the processing power is, but maybe you can get an idea from the 2012 readme?

Hah, somehow I missed that you said what processor was inside.  I think it will be fine.

[erfigge]

I probably should have been more specific.  This is the exact processor: 4th generation Intel Core i7-4650U 3.30 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 5000.

This is a hard decision.  Hard to make the leap to an ultra low voltage processor versus much higher dedicated laptop cpu.  But, the portability of the surface sounds nice in theory.   

[Sam_Sharp]

I use a Lenovo Yoga Pro for my 'mobile' development and it works just fine - that's an i5 with 4GB of RAM. Having an SSD for LabVIEW is great! I wouldn't want to do any heavy development without at least a mouse + external monitor on it but it's definitely snappy enough.

The HDD space might become an issue when you start having multiple versions of LabVIEW on there - especially with things like the Xilinx tools for FPGA compilations which take up a lot of space?!

[T-REX$]

I have a Surface Pro 3 for home use (i5, 8GB Ram, 256SSD), and can attest that it LabVIEWs like a champ (2014). Don't rely on the touch input though... Also, I do my FPGA compilations on the compile cloud.

[erfigge]

Thanks for all the feedback.  Basically I think the summary is it will work fine.  I do compile my FPGA code, but even though the surface has an ultra low voltage processor it is still much faster than my 6 year old core 2 duo latitude.  

And I have heard that common complaint about the trackpad input on the touch cover, so I guess thats a good reason to splurge on the arc mouse.  

[T-REX$]

To be fair, I haven't found a touchpad that comes anywhere close to good when programming LV. I use a Razer Diamondback gaming mouse that I got off Woot! in college.

I find the touchpad + touchscreen combo to be excellent for other tasks