Netbook for SolidWorks 2005?

A netbook it exactly that. It is designed for accessing the net, surfing and e-mail. Netbooks have small screens small drives, small RAM, low performance video and rather weak CPUs. What they do, they do quite well, but as a CAD/CAM machine? No.

The screen on a netbook is typically 8-10 inches (210-260mm) with WXGA resolution and often less. For CAD/CAM, you want at least a 15 inch (380mm) screen with a resolution of WSXGA or higher, and you absolutely want a matte screen finish, as glossy screens are highly reflective and very hard to use under anything but low-light conditions.

Netbooks usually have 1gig of RAM or less. For your purposes, you want at least 2gigs, and 4gigs is better.

The biggest drives I've seen in netbooks are 250gig and 5400rpm. 250gigs is good, but you want a 7200rpm drive, which is a lot faster.

For video, you need something fairly competent, though CAD/CAM requirements are quite the opposite of gaming. Either way, netbooks just don't have what you need.

The Atom processor is a single core CPU designed to minimize power consumption at the expense of performance. Unfortunately, CAD/CAM is computation intensive, and will tend to bog down an Atom. Furthermore, it is strictly 32bit, and 64bit is very desirable for this sort of work.

Will a netbook be able to run Solidworks 2005? Probably, but it will be very slow and very difficult to work with.

If I may, I would suggest a 15" machine with a Core2Duo or TurionX2, 2-4gigs of RAM, 250gig or bigger 7200rpm drive, a WSXGA or higher display and either Windows XP 64bit or Windows 7 64bit. I personally like Lenovo's ThinkPads. They are very well made with very good components, very solidly built, and tend to be very long-lived. They build a machine, the W500, which is very nearly perfect for an engineer, though it is a somewhat costly. If cost is an issue, T60s and T61s can often be found on eBay for less than $500US, and many are still under warranty. Many will have smaller drives, but these are easily upgraded at fairly low cost.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you need a more specific recommendation.

Actually, the video requirements for gaming are exactly opposite of those for CAD/CAM. In gaming, you have a relatively few polygons which move rather quickly. In CAD/CAM you can have a huge number of polygons, but they don't move around a lot.

nVidia's GeForce line is primarily intended for gaming, as is ATI's Radeon. Very high frame rates at high resolution are their primary feature. On the other hand, the nVidia Quadro and ATI Fire cards are more directed toward professional use. This is not to say that some gaming cards will not work for CAD/CAM or vice-versa, especially at the upper end of the market, but if one is trying to optimize for one or the other, it is best to stick to dedicated gaming cards or 3D graphics cards.