Laptop Recommendations

[techlists at phpcoderusa.com]

I agree with you David.  Only thing I would add is it is important to 
know how the machine will be used.  You are right.  I have a 12 year old 
Toshiba that has a 1G Celeron and 256mb of ram.  I was able to load and 
test Qmail Toaster on CentOS 5.

However I would never want to do any Drupal development on it.  I think 
short of doing some serious manipulation of tons of data an i3 with 
virtualization turned on and 4GB of RAM should do just fine.  I would 
expect to be able to run Drupal Commerce localhost with little problem 
and Drupal Commerce is a resource hog.

I would not go below an i3 for any serious dev work unless you are doing 
some basic LAMP dev. Or just email and web.

As you pointed out the prices have fallen substantially.

I think the actual question was about heat though.



On 2014-08-12 23:58, David Schwartz wrote:
> I’m surprized that people even bother asking questions like this these
> days, especially when it comes to Linux.
> 
> You can run Linux in a system with an 800 MHz Atom CPU, 256 MB of RAM
> and 20 GB HDD and it runs just fine.
> 
> There are tiny Media boxes you can get for $50 that have 1.2 GHz ARMs,
> 4 GB of RAM, gigabit WiFi, and you can plug in as much storage as you
> want via USB.
> 
> My 10-year old Dell Inspiron 9300 has a 1.6 GHz Centrino CPU, 3 GB of
> RAM, and a 120 GB HDD, and while it’s slow to boot Win XP, it runs
> most apps just fine. (It needs a new battery, tho.)
> 
> My current machine is a MacBook Pro with a 2.7 GHz quad-core i7, 768
> GB SSD, and 16 GB of RAM. I run it with a second 24” HD display, and
> it’s configured with 20 desktops (10 up and 10 down). I do all of my
> Windows development in a VMWare VM running Windows 7. It’s fast and I
> suspect will last a very long time. And under the hood, it’s running
> some Unix variant (Mach, which is I think a BSD derivative).
> 
> The thing that kills it  (and every other computer I use) is browser
> windows. Browsers leak memory like crazy. Every one of them.
> 
> Last fall I bought an ASUS laptop with Win 7 on it from Best Buy for
> $275 because MS was about to ship Win 8, so the retailers were
> flushing out everything at a big discount. I don’t even remember how
> it’s configured, only that it was a screaming deal at the time.
> 
> Buy whatever you can afford that’s fairly new. It’ll probably work just 
> fine.
> 
> As for the disk … I’d recommend a Seagate Hybrid Drive. Get the 1TB
> with 8 or 16 GB of cache. They’re under $100 and nearly as fast as an
> SSD.
> 
> (BTW, a word of warning: once you go hybrid or SSD, you’ll want to
> poke your eyes out waiting for stuff to open up on machines with
> regular HDDs on them!)
> 
> -David
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 12, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone use an Dell XPS15 or M3800 laptop? I am looking at these 
>> two models, or perhaps the developer edition with Ubuntu 
>> pre-installed. I have read that these machines get really hot...to the 
>> point of the machine crashing. Just wondering about anyone's personal 
>> experience.
>> 
>> Also, any recommendations for other brands? I am looking for a core 
>> i7, at least 8 GB or RAM, and a large SSD to run Debian. Many of the 
>> "native linux" machines are huge and thick....I liked these two Dell 
>> models as they have a sleeker design and don't weigh 10 lbs.
>> 
>> Any thoughts on whether to have a small SSD for the OS and a companion 
>> hard drive for data, or just blow a wad on a huge SSD (1 TB) for both 
>> OS and data?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Mark
> 
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