The Ultimate (Affordable) Developer Laptop

For the last 2 years I’ve been using a Toshiba Satellite U305 – a nice, lightweight 13 inch laptop/netbook that did a great job for email, word processing, blogging, and powerpoint. The purchase decision on this one was pretty simple – max price $900 – go to BestBuy, and check the Windows Experience Index of every machine they have on display, and get the one with the best numbers. In this case, it was 3.2.

For the most part, I’ve not used it for development, and things were just fine. However, when I started building our UC BackChannel app, the lack of power became really evident. Launching Visual Studio 2010 would take about a minute. Once that was up, trying to open SQL Management Studio was nearly impossible. Since I was due to upgrade the machine in November anyhow, and we’ve got a mountain of work right now, I thought I’d look at getting a more powerful system to enable more than just email and word doc editing outside of the office.

To be clear, I did not start off on a Hanselman-esque quest for the ultimate developer notebook. Rather, I simply started looking for a small(ish) notebook with a high-resolution screen and wanted to keep the price in the $1000 range.

So, I went to NewEgg.com, and fired up the Advanced Search and selected the highest screen resoultion on the list – 1920 by 1080  – and sorted by price.

The top system was a $1200 Asus. Pretty close to my price range, so I was interested.

When looking at the description one thing that pops out is the 1.6Ghz. Since my old laptop was a 1.3 Ghz, this did not seem like much of a jump up, but since the price was right, I Googled the Core i7 720QM anyhow and saw this:

Ok, that sound more like it – a quad core chip that ramps up from 1.6Ghz to 2.8Ghz. Now I’m reallu interested. I ended up doing a lot more searching and reading, and in the end decided that for the money, there was no better notebook to be found. I ended up going for the Asus G51JX-X1. It’s got 4GB of RAM, with two open slots so it’s easy to bump it up if need be. It’s got a 1GB nVidia GEForce graphics card, and the usual DVDRW/CDR/SD stuff. I also ordered up a 128Gb Kingston SSD. What’s nice about this kit is that it comes with an enclosure, so you just pull the HDD out of your notebook, stick it into the enclosure, and you’ve got an externa USB drive.

What’s Awesome…

Well, it’s fast. Really fast. It’s no problem to have 3 or 4 instances of Visual Studio open, along with FireFox, Chrome and Photoshop. The Windows Experience Index is pretty good too…

So, I’m stuck at 5.9 because the RAM is not fast enough. Everything else is 6.7 or greater. ZaZoom!

What’s not…

I now understand why people dig netbooks – although this is just the 15.4 inch model this thing is a beast comparted to the Toshiba.

Also, the chicklet keyboard is taking some adjustment – feels like it requires more pressure than the Toshiba, but for the most part, if I’m actually hittin it hard, I’ll be using a MS Natural keyboard.

The base G51JX actually has 2 hard drive bays. However, the -X1 model puts some additional RAM slots into that extra bay. This was a bummer because it would have been really sweet to have both the SSD and the 500Gb HDD in the machine. Having the external drive is just fine, and I only had a 120Gb HDD on the Toshiba, so it’s easy to live within the SSD.

Overall, I’m very happy with the system, and expect to get a lot of “real” development work done with it. However, I may still keep my Toshiba for times when  I don’t need a lot of horsepower.