Reply to: Which laptop?

[eek]

Wait for Intel Haswell CPU to be out next month - this should improve battery life a lot.

Problem is by the time they become readily available it will be July not June.

[AtW]

Wait for Intel Haswell CPU to be out next month - this should improve battery life a lot.

[suityou01]

go for ec2. The boot up time on an azure box is painful if you want stuff in a hurry.

Not a huge fan of EC2 right now I'm afraid.

[eek]

If you're going that route, why not consider EC2/Azure instances? Sorry if this is a bit OT suity...

go for ec2. The boot up time on an azure box is painful if you want stuff in a hurry.

[d000hg]

Why not set up a proper server at home and RDP into it?

If you're going that route, why not consider EC2/Azure instances? Sorry if this is a bit OT suity...

[Scrag Meister]

Dell XPS 15 L521x

Already comes with 2 hard drives, a small (30gb) mini sata drive and a proper HDD with an intel speed boost raid type thing.
You can rip them both out and fit a bigger mini sata drive (up to 250gb) and a proper SSD drive and replace the DVD with another SSD drive and that will allow you to run multiple VMs from disks which are not also trying to run the base OS

Screen is full HD and feels bigger than 15"
CPU is up to i7 quad core
RAM up to 16GB

Get it with the full Dell business support (they generally don't mind if you make any modifications yourself)

all in, it should be just over £2K

and it'll even play Bioshock Infinite

WSCS, I have one too. Lovely bit of kit.

[suityou01]

Why not set up a proper server at home and RDP into it?

Single disk single controller non scsi/sas setup will never serve vm's adequately, io will kill you.

Not sure my cruddy Sky broadband could hack it.

[stek]

Which laptop?

Why not set up a proper server at home and RDP into it?

Single disk single controller non scsi/sas setup will never serve vm's adequately, io will kill you.

[quackhandle]

You aren't going to get an 8 core laptop, unless 4 cores with hyperthreading counts.

Personally I would consider buying a solid machine with a lower spec and retrofitting RAM and an SSD. You can get a 500GB SSD for £260 now, most modern machines will take 16GB RAM and you can get it for £100 from Crucial.

Lenovos may not be pretty but the thinkpads have great keyboards, good guarantees and are designed to be upgraded and repaired in the field. I've seen second hand i5 T420 in CEX for around £450, Dell and HP make equivalents but they don't turn up so often. Unless you have to buy new you could have one of those upgraded with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD and £200 left over to spend on a 24" monitor if the smaller screen bothers you that much.

Love my T420s.

qh

[bobspud]

There was a good review a few weeks ago that basically said the cleaner the base install out the box the better the laptop will behave. I can't find it at the moment but this is worth a look

Apple MacBooks lead in laptop features and reliability | PCWorld

[Goatfell]

Probably not a make that would jump out at you but it ticks all your boxes on spec and price apart from W7. Being in Germany you can probably pick it cheaper there, but you'd have the 'wrong' keyboard though.

MEDIONshop UK | MEDION® ERAZER® X7819 (MD98257)

Not the most elegant looking bit of kit but hey, neither's a Transit.

[doodab]

Time for SY01 ltd to buy another. My old Sony Vaio VPCEC2S0E has had it's chips. Well not quite, but needs to be pensioned off. Some warning signs this week that it's not happy running VMs any more.

So I have a budget of not more than 1K.

I need oodles of RAM as I run VMS. What would be nice is if I could run more than 1 VM concurrently (admittedly the single spindle is the bottleneck)

So > 8GB Ram.
8 Core processor or better?
No less than 500Gb HDD.
Windows 7 preferred over windows 8.

I have found some HP Envy's that take my fancy but they only seem to come in 4 core I7 flavours.

Any advice appreciated as ever, etc etc.



Oh and definately no Lenovos as they are fugly.

You aren't going to get an 8 core laptop, unless 4 cores with hyperthreading counts.

Personally I would consider buying a solid machine with a lower spec and retrofitting RAM and an SSD. You can get a 500GB SSD for £260 now, most modern machines will take 16GB RAM and you can get it for £100 from Crucial.

Lenovos may not be pretty but the thinkpads have great keyboards, good guarantees and are designed to be upgraded and repaired in the field. I've seen second hand i5 T420 in CEX for around £450, Dell and HP make equivalents but they don't turn up so often. Unless you have to buy new you could have one of those upgraded with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD and £200 left over to spend on a 24" monitor if the smaller screen bothers you that much.

[jmo21]

<shiny toys/>

all in, it should be just over £2K

So twice what he wants to pay

[Spacecadet]

I thought that. Being a Vaio they're not nice to strip down.

I'm sure your local computer repair shop could have a go for you

[suityou01]

You might have a fan and heat sink clogged up with a few years of dust and fluff.

Get it stripped down and cleaned out properly, then do a fresh windows install.

I thought that. Being a Vaio they're not nice to strip down.