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Hardware choices

I'm in a quandry (and not because I haven't posted in a while - I have a number of posts in draft form that need to come).

I'm looking at new machines but I'm unsure. Do I invest in a better server to handle better VMs and possibly Hyper-V and then simply RDP into it when needed or do I look at a laptop for more VPCs?

Ideally it would be both - but economics these days limit the potential. Server hasn't been upgraded for 4 years (Dell SC400) but neither really has the laptop (Dell5150)

Platform doesn't matter these days. Thoughts?

Comments

Unknown said…
Laptops are more expensive and not upgradable. I'd buy a desktop unless you actually need a new laptop.

Regarding platform to choose, I'm assuming most of your clients run Windows.

If you do hardware support, and don't already have a mac, you might want to get one. They are getting more popular all the time. Where I used to live, you could find a windows "mechanic" under every shadetree. There was only one company offering mac support, and they didn't do it very well. So I bought an intel mac.

I recently had a friend who got tired of vista and replaced it with ubuntu. After he spent a day struggling to get VMWare to compile on it, he reinstalled vista. Linux is fine for servers, but still not a very good choice for a desktop system.
Andrew MacNeill said…
Hey Brian - ended up with a new laptop after all...definitely necessary but I think I'll still be looking at a new server shortly primarily for VS 2008 Hyper-V.

The laptop is on Vista - interesting for sure. Not sure if I'll go back to XP or not. I have an older machine running Ubuntu right now and it's not bad for someone who knows what they're doing.
Eric Selje said…
Have you considered any sort of hosted solution, or even Azure? I'd like to hear of real world experiences with these.
Andrew MacNeill said…
Hi Eric- not really interested in a hosted solution - although a colleague did offer one up.

The problem with hosted is that I have to ensure internet connectivity at all time.

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