mobile workstation

I just ordered a new notebook.

I need this because Emily uses the main computer at home during the day for her business and since we are still a virtual company with no office space, I require something that I can plug in at Starbucks and I didn’t want to be like this guy.

The research for this took way more hours than it should have — something we are hoping to eventually address with Notches btw.  

I did a low-budget, average user notebook buying guide from a couple months ago and while much of that transfers over, I am pretty hard on machines and have some specific requirements. My brother Kevin has one of these too and he’s happy with his.

Anyway point by point here’s what I went for:

• Dell Precision M65
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 – nice price/performance point
• 2 GB RAM – more was just too expensive in a notebook
• 15.4″ WUXGA – this is what drove everything else. My mother just bought a 15.4 widescreen HP machine that I helped pick out and I like that 15.4 is the same height as a 14″ model, which means you could plausibly open it on an airplane. WUXGA is 1900×1200 resolution. I find that vertical resolution is the most important thing about a screen.
• 80 GB, 7200 RPM HD – fast, but not big. Big stuff can stay on the home machine and I have remote access to it 24/7 thanks to Windows Server 2003 remote access.
• NVIDIA® Quadro FX 350M 512MB Turbocache, OpenGL — ooo, fancy. I knew I didn’t want integrated Intel video
• Media Bay Battery – when you really need battery life, these go in the spot where the DVD drive lives and can hopefully get me six hours or more total.
• Everything else is defaults

The other main option considered was the Asus R1F tablet PC, but I made the final call on screen size and resolution. In the same field as the M65 I looked at the Thinkpad Z61p, but it seems that it was a little thicker, a little heavier, and IBM wouldn’t give me a business lease. Dell came through with a superior buying process.