Matlab and ASUS UL20A-A1 Laptop

Hi,
I am seriously considering buying an ASUS UL20A-A1 laptop, but wanted to know if Matlab can run on it.

According to the specifications for Matlab, it requires an "Intel or AMDx86 processor supporting SSE2 instruction set" processor. Also, it requires 1 GB of RAM to run (ideally 2 GB).
see: System Requirements - Release 2010a - Windows

Here are the specs on the computer I want to buy:

Product Features
1.3GHz Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo Processor
2GB of DDR2 RAM, 2 Slots, 4GB Max
250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM), No Optical Drive
12.1" WXGA LED LCD Display, Wi-Fi 802.11 bgn, 0.3M Webcam
Windows 7 Home Premium Operating System (64 bit), *7.5 Hours of Battery Life
Processor, Memory, and Motherboard
Hardware Platform: PC
Processor: 1.3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Number of Processors: 2
RAM: 2 GB
RAM Type: SDRAM
Hard Drive
Size: 250 GB
Manufacturer: Portable
Type: Serial ATA
Cases and Expandability
Size (LWH): 11.9 inches, 9.2 inches, 1.2 inches
Weight: 4.18 pounds

This is from: Amazon.com: ASUS UL20A-A1 Thin and Light 12.1-Inch Silver Laptop - 7.5 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium): Computer & Accessories

Can anyone tell me if I will be able to run Matlab on this computer? Or does anyone have experience running Matlab on this laptop and can tell me how fast it is?

Thanks.

 

Well you can certainly run matlab on that computer, but what kind of work will you be doing with it?

I have some experience using extremely processor intensive work with matlab with respect to cognitive modelling, and it took 24 hours to compute an output: I was using my lab's ultra fast 8 core processor. I wrote another program with Matlab that could easily have run on a 486. Depending on your code, that processor might really slow you down.

If you are just using the laptop to write and test code, and you have a workstation that you can use for the actual runs, then it's really a non issue.

That laptop has a slower processor, in favor of long battery life, light weight, and low heat dissipation. Its not THAT slow, but its nothing compared to an i5 dual core or i7 quad core.

I personally ran matlab 7.5 on a core duo 2.0 ghz with no problems (writing code / testing) but if I used it to process a large matrix with our holographic memory model, it would have taken days.

 

Well, I mainly want to use Matlab for image processing. I am taking jpeg images and extracting the data about the pixels of RGB in each image. The work I do only requires 3 commands.

I don't have another workstation to do the tests on, but I'm thinking what I'm doing is a fairly simple function that won't slow the computer down too much.

Thanks for the response.

 

It should run fine. We have even more archaic PC's in the lab and they can do computationally complex simulations with Matlab with no problems. They're slow, but they run fine. A more pressing matter is the RAM, just watch out that you won't be using > 1GB of RAM on this computer otherwise I predict the system will crawl.