Time to buy a new laptop - which is best for around £1K

[Freamon]

Power for data crunching is paramount.
Should have a reasonable battery life and low weight.
Already have a Mac Air and iMac, so no more Macs.

Any ideas, I've read a few sites, but wanted to ask the congregation

If you are a permie then why are you paying for your own laptop for "data crunching"?

[Spacecadet]

dell outlet at 2:30pm.

Should get an all singing dancing Latitude E6520 for that money with an i7 and ssd.

advantage with one of these is that fitting a second internal hard disk is a doddle, then you can read from one HDD, process and write to the other

[eek]

advantage with one of these is that fitting a second internal hard disk is a doddle, then you can read from one HDD, process and write to the other

Be careful there as the e6520 seems to have a different layout to previous ones (but if you could point me in the direction of something that works I would be very grateful).

Based on the amount of money I saved the 256gb M4 was more than covered by the saving and more than covers my needs.

[doodab]

advantage with one of these is that fitting a second internal hard disk is a doddle, then you can read from one HDD, process and write to the other

A lot of business class machines let you do that.

[Spacecadet]

Be careful there as the e6520 seems to have a different layout to previous ones (but if you could point me in the direction of something that works I would be very grateful).

Based on the amount of money I saved the 256gb M4 was more than covered by the saving and more than covers my needs.

NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

It replaces the optical drive... and for most people it's an infrequently used piece of kit

[sasguru]

What sort of data crunching? Will it benefit from more cores, large amounts of memory or fast disk? Can it take advantage of GPU acceleration?

Fast disk most of all. SAS is heavily IO intensive when sorting.

[SimonMac]

I've been looking at laptops, but it mostly ends in despair. Stupid 16:9 screens that are no good for anything, at least those Dells do something other than 1366x768, and stupid number pad keyboards (why?). I can't help feeling all the PC manufacturers are playing into Apple's hands.

I'm leaning towards Lenovo. I read a lot of good things about their forthcoming S430.

ClientCo has issued me a Lenovo, battery life is fantastic can easily get a full day from my T420 (although the X220's the permies have look drool worthy)

[scooterscot]

Here you go...

[Mr.Whippy]

Sony, HP or Acer. Probably in that order.

Don't get a Sony. In my experience they're badly put together and not very resilient.

I bought a Vaio and regretted it completely, bits of it falling off after a few months and having to be glued back on....And I really look after my stuff so it wasnt me being heavy handed,

[doodab]

Fast disk most of all. SAS is heavily IO intensive when sorting.

You might want to consider buying a half decent machine with the cheapest possible disk and fitting an SSD yourself, you'll get a lot more bang for your buck that way. From what I gather SAS does a lot of sequential IO so there will be some mileage in tuning buffer sizes and so on to maximise throughput, with large enough IOs you should see 4-500MB/s out of the current generation SSDs as long as the laptop is reasonably modern and has a 6Gbps SATA interface.