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What is the best developer laptop on the planet, and why?

HP I’ve been discussing various aspects of the developer world with Andrew Kass lately and as you know I am not short on opinion.  So I thought I would ask you a couple of questions.  I know a lot of you are either developers, used to be developers, or know and have to deal with developers.  Grin.

What is the best laptop for a developer, and why?  

Sounds like a simple enough question but there are a lot of variables.  And if you were going to buy a machine today, what would it be? 

What operating system would you run?  What would the toolset look like?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    The best developer laptop was a MacBook Pro 17" (dual or tri booted) but the new Dell 6400 with the availble 12 gig of RAM might make it the new bench mark.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    Will, the laptop you mentioned has four SoDIMM slots and max memory capacity is 16GB.  Mighty tempting, but who would ever need more than 8?  Sounds like the old 64k question.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    I'm not a developer, but I have a W500 configured wiht 4GB of RAM and a second 500GB HD. I run virtual machines on this system and the performance is fantastic.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    I am a tech at my company and I've provisioned several Dell M6400 laptops to our in-house developers.  They are running Vista64 on a quad core,  4GB of RAM and RAID'd 256GB solid state drives.  The devs run VMWare, VS2008 and a slew of other apps.  I've seen them running several images and VS2008 while using conferencing tools with no noticeable decrease in performance. If you can afford it, go for the M6400 Covet and you won't have to worry about upgrading for a very long time!

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    ThinkPad.. anything in the W Series and 4GB of RAM.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    The lenovo T500, I love the way you can boot to the second drive via the BIOS.  So I have Vista x64 as my main drive, the second drive is either Windows Server 2008 R2 beta running hyper-v or Windows 7.  It has 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and i am almost ashamed of how much I love this machine.  :-)

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    I will take the HP EliteBook 8730w any day! The specs: -> Quad core or Intel Core 2 Extreme processor ->8gb of RAM ->Nvidia Quadro FX3700 w/ 1GB video RAM ->17" HP Dreamcolor display offering up to 16 million colors ->Upgrade bay allowing replacement of optical drive w/ second 250 or 320GB hard disk That is one dev rig I can relate to!

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    HP EliteBook 8530w with Intel x9100, 8GB...  I run Vista x64, VS2008, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and WSS on Vista from Bamboo Nation to support local MOSS.  The machine is very fast, very solid and very portable.  Docks for dual monitors at home and office, plenty of battery life for the train ride in between, etc... The best laptop I have ever used - and I've used a lot of 'em.

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2009
    For my development needs the best laptop is anything with 2GB or more of ram and a lot of hard drive space for all my VPC's

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    A Wyse Thin Terminal running Wyse Thin OS (WTOS) connected to a BEEFY Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server. Beat that!

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    Why my message never get posted???? I said, Thinkpad W500 :(

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    Kashif, I never received a comment until now.  Any particular reason you think the ThinkPad W500 is superior?

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2009
    @Ben O: how would you get work done in some out-of-way area, or if there isn't a connection to the 'beefy Server 2008' rig? Personally, since I tend to travel a lot, being able to run VMs at near native speeds is a must. I would probably run R2 and mount VMs natively.

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2009
    Yea, the Dell Covet definitely has the drool factor.  I would like a Quad Core 16GB of RAM machine, too.

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2009
    I use a Dell M4400 with 8GB and Quad QX9300 Pro: Fast   Runs Windows Server 2008 Allows some major data crunching Con: Heat--Never cold using this Noise--Varies, but somewhat noisy Power/Battery.  Even with Battery Slice only get 5-6 hours of use.

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    November 24, 2015
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