[thelist] decisions in buy... was > On the road designs

[Andrew Forsberg]

I don't know about Ron's reasons -- but mine for preferring IBM is 
that they have a wealth of information on their site, detailing 
specs, replacement parts, upgrade options, etc etc. If you're at all 
interested in running non-MS development platforms this sort of 
information is vital. No. 1 on my list of things to look for is Intel 
10/100 built-in ethernet. It seems almost all non-MS x86 OSes support 
these boards, and if you're testing on a local lan, or just need to 
go from office to office and stay networked without PCMCIA cards, 
it's really important.

Unfortunately the NZ IBM sales team and/or communications with trade 
partners, is completely useless, so my latest purchase was a Toshiba 
Satellite Pro 4600 for this reason. The details are boring. 
Fortunately Toshiba laptops are at least as good in terms of 
equipment quality, unfortunately Toshiba's online resources are 
rather thin on the ground. I was lucky that all the parts on this 
machine are entirely standard, so you can whip out the hdd, and 
replace it with the latest, higher spec and size, ibm drive with no 
hitches, and the ethernet works as well.

So, the question is not necessarily 'what's the fastest laptop?' for 
web dev, it can as easily be 'what has the most boring and standard 
parts?'

<tip type="DNS / BIND">
Dan's Apache 'alias' tip works great, but it can be more educational 
to learn how to create a working subdomain system for your local 
development testing. Most unix OSes come with some version of BIND, 
so if you haven't already, think about going out and buying a copy of 
O'Reilly's 'DNS and BIND.' It's a roller-coaster ride through all 
that intriguing nslookup, in-addr.arpa, and DNS fun fun fun.

In half an hour I'd learnt all I needed to create a name server on 
said Toshiba laptop, and subdomains for all the current projects I'm 
working on. It's great to be able to walk into a client's office, 
bung your laptop into the lan, give them an IP address to point their 
computers to temporarily for an additional nameserver, and showcase 
the current status of their site without changing default apache web 
doc directories, or having to use aliases.

Aliases are ok, but it's nicer to have a development site with its 
own namespace (so stuff like "/index.php" works in development and 
deployment, for example).
</tip>

>Could you tell us why this particular laptop is your first choice?
>
>Thank You
>Kevin
>
>>IBM Thinkpad T21 or 22 is the way to go.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Ron White

-- 
Andrew Forsberg
---
the pander - http://thepander.co.nz/
uberNET - http://uber.net.nz/