how can you get a better version of sketch up on an old laptop?

upgrade the laptop ? :P

@tinsoldier Lol.
@gogosavage Sketchup is quite light on resources imo and can run on almost any device without any problem. I'm saying this because I use an old laptop too (I got it when I was in 4th grade and still use it)

Yah ma, @dedted is spot on. If you cant run sketchup, which I could get running perfectly on a 2004 think pad. you got something wrong with your computer

Just a quick PSA for you guys:

On the sketchup download page, it seems that they push you towards an online HTML5 based version of Sketchup, rendering it incompatible with 3DRad. This could suggest that they may remove the desktop version all together in the future. To download the desktop version of sketchup, go to https://www.sketchup.com/download/all and get Sketchup 2017 Make. Make is the free version, so you can keep using it, even after the 30-day pro trial expires.

the newer sketchup version dont work as fast as the previous ones on older systems, they require higher version of open gl and i have encountered lags, try using sketchup 8 for it should be faster.

@dedted no sketchup it not light on resources at all, idk if you ever made a huge scene with lots of components, or tried rendering it or maybe open different instances of sketchup at once

and @raver a 2004 thinkpad is not good enough if you want to model using sketchup 2017, maybe for a really low poly model it is.

I feel SketchUp is too much of a RAM eater nowadays... My PC can't handle 150k polygons in SketchUp, while it can handle a million polygons in Blender...

Don't know if you guys are aware, since sketchups 3D warehouse stop supporting downloads to 2016 or earlier sketchup formats, what you can do is download the 2017 or 2018 model as .DAE format, then use "import" in your sketchup version to load the .DAE model... from there you can use the 3drad export utility to get the model into 3drad.

I did this with a 2017 sketchup model exported to .DAE format then "imported" into both sketchup v8 and sketchup 2016, worked perfectly  in both cases.