Laptop survey

PLBoudette

Member
Join Date
Jan 2006
Location
Albany, NY
Posts
41
Currently I'm using an old SONY Vaio running Windows XP Home Edition (modified to XP Pro). It has been very reliable over the years, but alas, it is starting to slow and I'm afraid will **** out at any moment. My main usage is for RSLogix 500, 5000, Proficy ME, and Factory Talk View Studio. But I also have several other software programs on there that are used sparingly (VersaPro, PanelBuilder32, InTouch, SIMATIC Step 7, Cimplicity, iFIX, MOSCAD Programming Toolbox, System Tools Suite). I've been reading up quite a bit on laptops, VMWare, Virtual PC and the like but I was wondering what recent laptops people are using now, their OS setups, and their pros/cons to their system setup. Specifically I've been looking at the HP Elitebook B2A89UT so if anyone has that particular machine, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion. Thanks.
 
laptops

I've just been through this. all the programs which load up SQL servers and various other services when windows starts and 30GB free out of 260GB had brought my laptop to a crawl, constant hard drive light on.

I started looking for new laptops but quickly found that to get one with a solid state drive (SSD) you are instantly in the $1500 range and still only getting 120GB drive.

120GB SSD OCZ vertex 3 can push 500 megabytes/s easy and does 60,000 IO operations per second, compared to 1-2ms seek times on a spinning HDD, and was on for $113 at newegg. 16GB ram cost $110 or so delivered as well. it makes zero sense to get these upgrades from the manufacturers, as long as you have the time to install them yourself.

When you are buying a laptop there is only one thing to consider: the display size. Choose how big a unit you want to lug around and the rest will fall in to place.

I would have got a lenovo T420, 14" screen with 1600X900 resolution but there are many reports that this screen has poor viewing angles and just generally looks poor. the 15" T520 apparently has a much better screen and the X220 is also meant to be top notch but is only 12".

I got a hard drive caddy from newmodeus.com for my dell vostro 3400, moved the HDD in to it and put the SSD in the hard drive bay, installed windows on the SSD, and now I can boot in to my old installation in case there was some setting or configuration of a program I still need and I have the new installation which is quick as lightning on the SSD.

I have installed all my software tools which either install services or that I need multiple versions of (citect, unity, wonderware, woodward config tools, unitronics, etc) in virtualbox VMs which will allow me to move to another laptop without having to reinstall anything except for office, chrome and virtualbox, just by importing the VM.

I've had no issues with using network or serial ports from within the windows XP VM.
 
Thanks for that citation for Newmode !

Everything I've read says that Dell didn't make a hard drive caddy for the optical drive bay on my Precision M4500... but Newmode does.

To answer the OP: I'm a big fan of Dell hardware, and my company has an account that gets us decent prices and good repair service. I would get a Precision workstation with a powerful CPU, then put my OS on a flash drive (as V0N suggests) and virtual machines on a secondary hard drive.

I tend to buy one-generation-older hardware from Dell as refurb/outlet stuff. The ATG "semi-rugged" stuff is heavy but very tough.

VMWare Workstation is my virtualization solution; we use it Company-wide and it just plain works.
 

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