Looking for a good laptop

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

dnguy19@gmail.com wrote:

> Hi Guys and Gals,
>
> I took the plunge and decided to try out Mac OS X. I absolutely love
> it. However, I want to get back to my Windows life. I'm looking for a
> good laptop to put Windows 2003 Enterprise Server and Linux on. I know
> it sounds funny, a laptop with a server OS. I'm trying to save space
> and it's just for me to learn on at my home. Nothing fancy. I was
> thinking about Alienware, but I don't want to fork out $3000 grand
> again like I did for my 17in Powerbook G4. Any help would be great. I
> could use a desktop, but I'd want something portable.

Well, a Gateway M7305 certainly has sufficient computing power to run any of
those for about 1400 bucks. If you want to learn networking, then max out
the RAM and spend the bucks for a copy of vmWare or VirtualPC.

Also, you might want to consider registering as a Microsoft Partner and
subscribing to the Action Pack--gets you quite a lot of server and
application software for 300 bucks with updates for a year--note by the way
that the Action Pack also includes VirtualPC and it's all multiseat
licenses (or if you're a student you might want to consider going for an
academic subscription to MSDN Universal for 700 or so--gets most of the
same stuff with fewer seats but in some cases no activation required, and
the full Visual Studio package as well). The whole setup including the
Action Pack should cost less than that G4.

Then just for hohos download PearPC and put OS/X on it as well.

If you want to get an SATA PCCard and a couple of drives and drive
enclosures you can even run a fair sized RAID on it but that's less
portable.

By the way, keep your G4--it's a very nice Unix box in its own right--making
it work with Windows and making Windows work with a Unix server are
worthwhile exercises.

> Thanks!
>
> Duy

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)