Laptop advice

Hi Peeps,

for the first time in my life I am very temped by the MacBook Air.

http://www.apple.com/uk/macbookair/

I am a techie by trade, looking for good battery life and to run VMware and light with a decent screen size.

Anyone heard anything about them? Any alternatives out there I could consider?

My Budget is up to £1200.

Cheers for any advice.

Rich

Battery life is meant to be wank.
I'd get the macbook pro for that money - i think it's due for a revision.

erm why don't you get any other laptop and load Linux on it ? at least u'll save the money of paying Apple for the design

I use Ubuntu at home so I will likely do that, but I am not up on current good small/light weight laptops and just wondered if any one had any good suggestions.

Cheers

Rich

if you are familiar with Linux definitely go for that, it will definitely save you some cash over the Apple.

You should be able to get a decent Core Duo for that price. Go for the slower versions, that can save you some on battery life and you really don't need all the Mhz.
Since you want to run VMs on it go for at least 1G of RAM.
Also look for smaller screen sizes, that generally will also save on battery life.

i got a vaio (cr11zr) and thats very bike portable friendly.

it will run ubuntu as well, tho i had to use the alternate image and install the drivers (which were a pain to find) before i could get X to run...

[Luckypants]

Get a proper computer



That is all.

[timwilky]

Mike, that is so 80s.

Rich. I am a real covert to VMs on my laptop. I have a DELL Precision and for pure inconvenience run XP on it. But I then have VMWare workstation and have RHEL (Co standard server, FC7, and windoze server 2003) servers as VMs.

One trick is for the VMs that need to know the address of my laptop, as I travel and the ip can change daily and I run my development oracle under XE on the host XP. I built start up scripts to sed the ip address of the host pc where I resolved the host platform using nblookup into a template tnsnames.ora.

My real complaint is I only have 2GB of memory available, ideally I would like a min of 4 and a quad processor. One day work will realise that I need power on the laptop. Their answer is use a thin client and we will host your development servers centrally

I don't know much about Mac's, but do know about VMware (VCP and VAC Partner) . Doesn't this laptop run on Mac OS?

VMware Server (formally GSX) and VMware Workstation don't run on Mac OS. They need Windows or a Linux based host OS.

Microsoft do a version of Virtual PC for MAc, see http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

If you intend running 64bit VM's you'll need to get a Windows laptop as VPC doesn't do 64 bit guest OS. Don't assume even with an Intel x86 Windows laptop and VMware, that 'cos you have a 64bit capable processor like the Intel Core 2 Duo that you can do it either. Check that the laptop BIOS has the ability to enable Intel VT if you need to run 64bit VM's.

I've come across a lot of folk who bought a 64 bit laptop Intel laptop thinking they'd be able to run the likes of Exchange 2007 in a VM, upset when they find they can't. Bit like putting fog lights on the front of a car, then not putting a switch on the dashboard, but hey, manufacturers only care what it says on the spec sheet before you buy it, not what you can do with it after they've got your money. If you want to be sure specifically ask the question or buy an AMD.

[Luckypants]

Originally Posted by timwilky

Mike, that is so 80s.

LOL Certainly is, 3083 circa 1981. Note the water cooling. Cut my teeth on one those babies, oh the joys of IOGEN. None of this namby pamby plug it in and it works stuff.