PC Laptop advice

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So my company does a lot of work from home situations. They've got a VPN client to connect you to their network and then you remote desktop to the virtual machine on your at-work server and just work out of that.

I don't have a PC at home and while I suppose I could put a Windows VM on my Mac, I feel like it might be less hassle to just pick up a mid-range PC Laptop and use that (possibly also picking up a flat-screen monitor/keyboard/mouse so it's less laptoppy).

Do people have suggestiosn for a make/model of laptop? Becuase I'm really working out of my machine at work it doesn't have to be a super-beefy machine (although something mid-range would be nice). The big thing for me is that it doesn't come with a ton of crap pre-installed (I'm looking at you HP).

So if you have any suggestions, please toss them my way.

Thanks
Tom

Comments

[kadath.livejournal.com]

I was gonna say "HP, if you don't mind cleaning out all the shit they put on there."

So. Uh.

I got nothin'.

[harrison-ripps.livejournal.com]

True, but HP's got nothing on Sony when it comes to preinstalled crap.

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I've liked the Lenovo laptops in the past. I've also had reasonable luck with Dell but only with machines from their small business line (Latitude), where both the hardware and the customer service seem to suck significantly less than for the consumer Inspiron models.

[bryant]

Most VPN software out there has a Mac client; I VPN into work from my Mac all the time (we use Cisco). Your IT group might or might not approve that. I use CoRD for remote desktop into my work desktop as needed.

[hawkhandsaw.livejournal.com]

I've got Teamviewer on my mac to control our tv computer from my laptop. I can't tell you any more then that because Wris set it up for me, but I know it's possible to remote from a mac to a pc.

[hawkhandsaw.livejournal.com]

wris says he'll help if you choose this route.

[harrison-ripps.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely with the "just use/upgrade your Mac" camp, especially if you are just using it as a front-end to a machine where the actual work is being done.

Look for the mac client for your VPN and then grab Remote Desktop Client for Mac; you should be good to go...

[katkt.livejournal.com]

There is a Remote Desktop client for Mac OSX and it works essentially as well as the windows Remote Desktop client. Personally, I would hate to try to develop on a remote machine -- the technology has come a long way, but the network latency still gives you lag in ways that makes it very frustrating to try to work with for an extended period of time. It's fine for short-term things, but for real work, I'd want to set things up to run locally.

Also, if you have an intel mac, I expect that buying a copy of windows and making a dual-boot machine will work better for you than getting a VM. If you don't have an intel mac, I wouldn't try developing on older hardware under emulation anyway

I have no windows laptop experience, so I can't give you any advice on that front -- except that they look surprisingly inexpensive these days.

[wotw]

If you need reliable customer service, then in my experience you can't beat Dell.

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

Dell and Lenovo are the two best if you want a big name company with a big support infrastructure in case something goes wrong. If you don't mind buying from a smaller company, I've been very impressed with the overall quality and price/performance of Asus laptops in the past couple years. They tend to have less junk pre-installed as well, and the one time I have had to deal with their customer support they were very good.

Newegg has a big selection of Asus laptops, and any of them should be able to do a VPN and remote desktop without issue.

[sben.livejournal.com]

In addition to the comments above about just using your Mac, there's a VPN client built in to more recent versions of OS X (10.5 and 10.6, perhaps earlier). It doesn't work with all VPN servers; I've found it to be much less hassle than the vendor's VPN client (Cisco's in my case).