At some point over the past four years it has come to light that I find analyzing data to be increadibly sexy. By default (and a bit of hard work and more classes than I care to think about) I've become our department statistician. Well, my old girl at home wouldn't do anything anymore so Mr. Man retired her to central storage off the home server (don't ask, I haven't a clue why or how!) he upgraded my desktop to something slightly bigger and faster, but I still can't really work from home.
I'm into my PhD and need to start some serious analysis. This means long hours at work. Not so good right? So this weekend I ordered a new toy. I get to pick her up in a couple of weeks.
She's a Thinkpad. I've been loyal since I got my first in '95.
The specs are:

Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM Quad Core Processor (3.1GHz / 6MB Cache / 1600MHz FSB)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit (TC/Eng)
2 x 4GB DDR3 1600MHz (MAXED to 32GB)
1TB 7200rpm HDD
15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) / Integrated 720p HD Webcam
nVidia Quadro K1000M Graphics w/ 2GB VRAM Dedicated
Lithium Ion 9-cell / Up to 10.8 hours
3-year International Warranty (1-year warrany for battery) 1-year Lenovo Protection Service

Do you think I can run my stats on that? SPSS, N vivo, Mplus and Rasch are what I normally pretend to use. or is she just a glorified word processor?

I think I'll name her Sue....

Will it run them? OMG! Unless you have 100s of 1000s of data points it will absolutely fly! That is a hell of a machine just for stats. You could use it for gaming which is much more processor intensive than stat programmes! Enjoy your new toy!

I've got around 2000 students over 7 universities. See the test I'm working on developing has been rolled out territory wide.

I've got a great boss who bought me all the software and a fantastic supervisor who's taught me how to use it.

I'm feeling like a lucky ducky right now. Maybe I can finally finish DOOM!

It's funny, I recall spending much (most) of my time as a grad student playing Doom - brilliant game, and always more fun than writing up!

I used to play Wolfenstein 3D (the precursor to Doom) a LOT! I played it so much that I dreamt about it. Once, after a particularly long session, I was dreaming that I was being attacked by the enemy. One solder crept up behind me, but I heard him and BAM! I reversed punched him in the face over my shoulder.Unfortunately, I actually did this move with my arm, and smacked my wife in the head! Of course, when I explained what happened, she understood completely, and then kicked me in the ...

My old laptop was at the end of her life when I played doom. She got me through a degree and I couldn't ask any more of her. I never did get to kill that big guy at the end.

I'm ready for a rematch!

I've never used (or even heard of) most of the statistical packages you use but the answer is "yes" -- your computer will process data just fine.

I seriously doubt you have large enough datasets for any statical computation to cause issues. The only issue you'd have that would prevent you from doing a computation would be memory (RAM). An inadequate CPU only means computation takes more time.

In reality though, your CPU can do billions of calculations a second and even the most complicated statistics just don't take that much math. I'd expect your longest computations to take on the order of seconds or maybe minutes.

With regard to memory and huge datasets, it depends a lot on size and the statistics you run. You'd probably need to have billions of entries before it became a problem.

Cool! Thanks guys. My old thinkpad was taking hours to run a simple ANOVA on around 14,000 comparisons. It was driving me nuts. Hence the maximum RAM. That's about all I know about computers.

Minutes sounds fast enough, seconds sounds like even more work. Let's not tell my boss.