Use Inventor on a Touchscreen laptop

[lauwers.ken]

Hi guys

Since I'm going to travel a lot in the future, I was thinking of buying a touchscreen laptop so I can work during the traveldays. A normal laptop is ofcourse to big to use on a plain or train.

Is Inventor compatible with those kind of laptops and have any of you already experience in it?

Like for instance I found this one:

LENOVO Yoga C640-13IML 81UE006TMB 13.3 FHD i5-10210U 8GB

Would this work and is it comfortable working on a touchscreen?

Thank  you in advance

Kind Regards

Ken Lauwers

[pcrawley]

Inventor isn't designed for the touch interface, so you may be frustrated by its usability.  Is it "compatible with those kind of laptops?"  Yes.  After all, they're Windows devices with a keyboard and mouse, plus the ability to move the mouse pointer with your finger on the screen. 

Are they "comfortable" to use... that probably depends on the person in front of you on the plane!  The most challenging aspect of using the touch interface (for me anyway) was the mouse/keystroke combination that is often required.  e.g. Rotating the model can be achieved with Shift+hold-middle-mouse-button - which isn't easy with a pen or finger pointer.  (Especially if you are using the touch-interface keyboard, which drops out of the way when there's no input field present.)  You could argue that there's an icon on the screen for rotating the model, but your productivity will plummet if you are forced to avoid some of the shortcuts because your chosen interface makes them impossible to use.

I used Inventor on a Surface Pro with the pen/finger pointing option, and I wouldn't say I liked it.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was back on the mouse after a few days.

All that said, I am sure there are some people out there who love it.  I'm just one of them.

[leowarren34]

As Peter said above, Inventor is not designed for a touch screen device, however, there should be some other considerations. Firstly it's a thin and light laptop which usually means less cooling which can lead to thermal issues. It also uses a U class Intel processor which uses less power but also has less performance. The other consideration is the lack of an integrated GPU as a lack of dedicated VRAM can kill performance.

However, it really depends on how big the files you plan to work on are, as a thin and light is an option if the files are on the smaller side.

[Gabriel_Watson · Accepted solution]

Quick answer: nope.

Our IT department experimented with Windows tablets for non-design users, and aside from several batteries bloating, I can tell that something as compact and mobile never worked well when we did try to bring in Inventor. We deal with very large assemblies though, so you have to give us more info on what you work with. I think simple furniture design should be ok for that PC, for example.

Also, are you supposed to be running 2022 Inventor on this new PC? Here are the recommended specs:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Syste...

The problems I see, besides touchscreen not being a thing as pointed out above, are that:
1- your integrated graphics card is not ideal for running larger models even as visualization only, and Inventor is not the most lean software in resource utilization;
2- your RAM is insufficient, so you can only work with small units and workflows;
3- CPU minimum requirements are 2.5 GHz, and this product has 1.6, so your experience should be pretty bad.

If you are buying this PC anyways, I would just keep in mind the limitations and maybe leverage the Inventor Beta "run Inventor from your browser" to do a few studies and small assemblies. I bet that is the future anyways, after we already transitioned to online subscription licensing...

[SharkDesign]

Other than being a viewer, don't bother. 

It's hard enough using inventor with a trackpad!!

[lauwers.ken]

Thank you all for the answers and help. It is clear this wouldn't be a very good idea.

The models are indeed large and I wasn't thinking about the performance of the laptop.

That means I can sleep on the plane instead of working 🙂

Have a nice day!