Which laptop?

[suityou01]

Time for SY01 ltd to buy another. My old Sony Vaio VPCEC2S0E has had it's chips. Well not quite, but needs to be pensioned off. Some warning signs this week that it's not happy running VMs any more.

So I have a budget of not more than 1K.

I need oodles of RAM as I run VMS. What would be nice is if I could run more than 1 VM concurrently (admittedly the single spindle is the bottleneck)

So > 8GB Ram.
8 Core processor or better?
No less than 500Gb HDD.
Windows 7 preferred over windows 8.

I have found some HP Envy's that take my fancy but they only seem to come in 4 core I7 flavours.

Any advice appreciated as ever, etc etc.



Oh and definately no Lenovos as they are fugly.

[suityou01]

For example

HP ENVY dv7-7338ea 17.3 " Laptop Deals | Pcworld

?

[d000hg]

Is 17" a requirement/preference or just a coincidence in that model?

[suityou01]

Is 17" a requirement/preference or just a coincidence in that model?

Requirement. I hate diddy screens.

[eek]

Requirement. I hate diddy screens.

That rather reduces your options now high resolution 15" screens have appeared and 17" ones are disappearing.

Are you sure you don't just need to reinstall the base operating system?

[Spacecadet]

Dell XPS 15 L521x

Already comes with 2 hard drives, a small (30gb) mini sata drive and a proper HDD with an intel speed boost raid type thing.
You can rip them both out and fit a bigger mini sata drive (up to 250gb) and a proper SSD drive and replace the DVD with another SSD drive and that will allow you to run multiple VMs from disks which are not also trying to run the base OS

Screen is full HD and feels bigger than 15"
CPU is up to i7 quad core
RAM up to 16GB

Get it with the full Dell business support (they generally don't mind if you make any modifications yourself)

all in, it should be just over £2K

and it'll even play Bioshock Infinite

[d000hg]

8 Core processor or better?

You don't want much... let us know what you go for, though.

It'd be too expensive but I was going to query a MacBook Pro, only to find they don't even make a 17" version now

[proggy]

I know you said not Lenovo, but I got one after selling my Mac Book Air. It's not as nice to look at, but who cares it's not your wife, its a computer. The keyboard is excellent, I bought mine with min spec and upgraded it after which saved me a few hundred.

[suityou01]

That rather reduces your options now high resolution 15" screens have appeared and 17" ones are disappearing.

Are you sure you don't just need to reinstall the base operating system?

Funny you should mention that. I was just discussing the same thing with one of my colleagues.

Faults are :

Freezes when particularly busy (overheating)?
Has stopped resuming windows. Even though I put it into hibernate mode, it won't come out of it. It starts to, then shuts off after a second. Then does a normal boot, like after a hard reset.
Just slow generally. Wondering if an i5 was ever manly enough to run WinServer2008 VM instances?

Would reinstalling the OS fix these things or is it new laptop time?

[Spacecadet]

Freezes when particularly busy (overheating)?

You might have a fan and heat sink clogged up with a few years of dust and fluff.

Get it stripped down and cleaned out properly, then do a fresh windows install.