I want to buy a brand new notebook for out-of-the-office work. I mainly develop using VC++ (vs03) and c# (vs08) on large projects (10 gb builds). At office I've a quad core xeon with 10.000 rpm disk.
What hardware, according to your experience, is the best for this kind of work in terms of price / performances / weight?
How often are you going to be on the road ?
I have a 17" Dell Laptop for OOO dev work and to be honest, it's a pain in the ass to drag around and extremely unportable.
That said it's a 1920 * 1200 res screen, 4Gb Ram, 7200 RPM disk. I've tried using Visual Studio on small res (1280*720) screens and I just loathe the experience and lack of screen realestate.
Decide on whether you want to go 13" / 15" / 17" and do a pro's & con's list of portability Vs. dev experience.
After that, max the machine out in terms of RAM/CPU/HD Speed to the whatever your budget can afford.
Edit Just to re-iterate some other good comments made.
If an SSD is an option for storage, go for it, though these tend to be quite expensive add ons.
4Gb of RAM should be the standard.
And for comparison, dell categorises it's laptops in terms of weight/portability as:
One thing I can say is a must if your doing large complex builds on a notebook is a SSD drive. I have just got one for my laptop and my ant build time went from 24seconds to 9!
Think pads are always rock solid!
Dell M6400 is good... 7200 harddrive, 4gig ram and the really high resolution screen...
Well I don't recommend any of the vendors but what I recommend you is that you must choose at least 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo system and maximum of 2KG in weight if you happen to be dragging it with you all the way long.
I would sure vote for DELL XPS Studio 16 ... its a great machine fast 2.93 Ghz, 4GB Ram, with option to add SSD drive up to 256GB ... best of all its bus speed is 1067 Mhz, that's really fast
and its lighter than 17" for protablility ...
its great for development and screaming fast ...
P.S. I don't work at dell ;)
I'm not really sure if one size fits all...
Are you actually going to work with the really big builds on the road, how often. Does portability matter, etc.
Remember RAM, disks and often batteries are changeable. Size and weight, screen resolution GPU and CPU are not.
For buying a dev laptop today, I would look for a good CPU and a decent GPU. A display size of 15.4 widescreen or more. (You have to decide if it's a good idea to have 1920*1280 on this screen. Personally I find 1440*900 or 1680*1050 to be sufficient... I'm not paying for higher resolution AND then also getting glasses to use it...)
For CPU models, have a look at this chart: http://www.intel.com/consumer/rating.htm. For GPUs, don't go for an "integrated" setup. I'm quite happy with a nvidia9400
Disks are cheap and easy to replace, just remember that a 7200rpm drains more battery than 5400 or 4200...
I also use a DELL (Latitude 620) with 4GB RAM and 2GHz Core Duo (unfortunately not Core 2 Duo). It works good but the screen resolution is too small (1440x900). On the other end it is very highly portable (don't ask for the real weight)! In the office I used the Laptop with two 17" monitors and in that environment it works great.
There are still two points to optimize:
I second the recommendation regarding SSDs (try to get an MLC device if possible), also I'd like to add that I've personally (and ironically so) found notebook specifically targeted at gamers to be pretty decent development platforms in general.