[nmglug] piece of iron

[Nick Frost]

On Jun 1, 2011, at 10:47 PM, Andres Paglayan wrote:

> Every three or four years comes a time when you gotta take the saddle out and shoot your horse.
> 
> My 4 year old T61 is still serving me good, a year ago changed the old HD for a SSD that brought her fresh live,
> but I am now replacing a noisy fan and makes me worry just about the next thing that can happen to my workhorse.
> 
> budget shouldn't be a problem as I type on this thing 24/7/365 x 4
> 
> I am looking at system76, lenovo T520, and mac hardware
> 
> So I wonder, what the list thinks is the best iron out there these days?

For a laptop I use a 15" macbook Pro 2.2 Ghz Core i7 with 8 GB of after-market RAM.  The best would be the 2.3 Ghz Quad-core i7 in 15" or 17" but the 15" is large and heavy enough.  I run Windows XP 32-bit, Windows 7 (64-bit), and various Linux and Solaris VM's in Parallels (previously used VMWare Fusion).  Virtualbox is another option.   With 4 cores, 8  threads and 8 GB of RAM the Macbook Pro's are performance laptops for sure.  The only other performance-oriented mod I would consider would be to put an SSD in this MB Pro but as for me I'd rather have data bits on actual platters and space.  I recently put an SSD into a new HP ProBook 4320s (Core i3) for a client with noticeable performance improvement (running Windows 7).  I'd still take a MB Pro over a Wintel PC laptop any day unless I were on a budget, in which case an $1,100.00 ProBook with an SSD is not a bad alternative for a very small and lightweight snappy Windows laptop (with...among other things... an excellent audio chipset).  So, I think the Macbook Pro's are the best laptop iron.  I find Windows often runs faster when virtualized on OS X.

Yet better iron: for a desktop or pedestal box I'd recommend building one (as I did recently...a quad-core 3.1 Ghz Core i7 with 6 GB of RAM on a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 running OSX86....it screams).  A friend overclocked a UD7 to nearly 4 Ghz with an after-market Cooler Master heatsink and says it runs stably (mostly MS Windows).

- Nick

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Nicholas S. Frost
7 Avenida Vista Grande #325
Santa Fe, NM  87508
nickf at frostitute.com
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