After our Form 1 arrives, I think I want to keep it in our garage. However, my workstation is in our home studio so I’m thinking of using my laptop with the Form 1.
Will there any performance difference if I use a laptop with the Form 1? In other words, does the performance of the Form 1 have any dependence on the speed of the computer that’s connected to it?
Please excuse my ignorance if I have the process completely wrong to begin with–just trying to learn. 
G.
Greenlaw,
The Preform software will generate and send the same instructions to the printer, so you should get the same print quality (or defects) with either computer.
The only difference is the display performance and the speed at which operations like generating the supports will be done.
If you are lucky, preform will like your laptop and you will get a good display refresh rate and a snappy fast GUI on large models (+100k faces)…
Otherwise if you might have to prepare your print on the workstation, then use the laptop just to load the .form file and send it to the printer…
See this thread for details:
http://support.formlabs.com/entries/23849381-Bug-Why-is-Preform-processing-all-the-time-
Cheers
Thank you! That was exactly the information I was looking for. My intention is to work on a file in the studio and sneaker net or wi-fi it to the laptop in the garage. Sounds like that will work fine then–unless there is some significant ‘convenience’ factor I’m overlooking.
G.
We got an old laptop hooked up permanently to the form1 that just stays on. It can barely move with the form1 software (the form software has very very poor display performance currently which doesn’t help) Also setting up a dropbox account on it is great, makes it easy to throw files at it for printing.
I needed to replace my daughter’s couple year old laptop (it’s now mine!) as the Preform software seemed to not like her video card. It would GPF with OpenGL errors and was unusable. She’s happy now as her Solidworks is faster than ever and Preform works great now :). Hopefully over time and some updates I’ll get it to work with Preform for myself :).