Seriously, have a look at the macbooks or Macbook pros.

You can run windows in a VM for notes admin/designer.

Sean,

I live on a 17" macbook pro and use VMWare for my Windows needs (Domino Designer mainly). I carry it around with me all the time and it does a great job.

And I think it meets all of your other requirements as well. Although I would go for 4gb of RAM just to max things out :-)

Matt

I guess I should list my spec...

- 17" MBP

- 1900*1200 resolution

- 2.6ghz processor

- 4gb RAM

- 200gb 7200rpm disk

In the UK that cost £2,200 but I think things are cheaper over there for you.

Matt

I can see the Mac crowd got to you already. ;-)

If you decide to stay on Windows my advice is to get a Thinkpad.

We have tried all makes except for HP, the Thinkpad is the only one our engineers can use in the wind tunnel with -50F temperatures or in the desert with 120F jumping up and down on the back of a 4x4.

The finger print scanner is just a nice-to-have, get 4Gb of memory, you'll need it. A 7200 RPM drive will not just sacrifice space, it should impact battery life too.

If you'll be mostly mobile get the WLAN.

With VMWare Fusion. Run Coverter on your old machine, and just suck it in there.

Get a 2gb RAM MB Pro, and get 4gb ram from crucial.com. The 17" is even better but its a monster to lug around (says the guy who lugged a Dell XPS Gen-2 around).

Dont bother with office for the Mac, spend the hundred bucks on iWorks08. Use office on the XP partition if you still need it. NeoOffice (open Office) for the Mac is free, Cord (remote desktop), Chicken of the VNC (VNC), etc. etc.

Remember you get all the development tools you'd ever want for free with Leopard. And NOtes 8.5 client beta - its really good. Best bit of beta code I've seen for a while, and a *lot* faster than 8.0x on windoze..

Why ? Cos if you wanted you could just slap XP or Vista (spit!) on the Mac.

Vista ? I'd rather hammer rusty nails through my eyeball than endure that pile of poo again.

--* Bill

Apple will be refreshing the MacBook Pros fairly soon, so you may wanna wait. If nothing else, as soon as the new models come out you can save about 15% on a refurb slightly-earlier model at the Apple Store.

This is exactly why I *didn't* ask for input on my new laptop. :-P I really wanted a Thinkpad T61P (P being the designation for workstation-class), but I couldn't find one at a price I was willing to pay. I eventually got a Dell Precision M90 { Link } . It's an absolute beast to lug around but I don't travel with it much, so having a desktop replacement was more important than an easily portable unit.

If you go with an Intel CPU you want a Core 2 Duo, not a Core Duo, so avoid anything in the T2000 series. Ideally you want a T7300 or higher. This will get you at least 2.0Ghz and 4MB L2 cache. The FSB will be either 667 or 800Mhz. Here is Intel's laptop CPU part numbers: { Link } . I don't know much about the AMD options for laptops so I can't help you there.

2GB of RAM is adequate but 3GB is definitely not overkill. I have 2GB and often have Visual Studio, Domino Designer, Domino 8.0 and a VMWare instance all running at the same time. I wouldn't go for 4GB on 32-bit Windows since it won't use all of it (no, really, it won't), and 64-bit Windows isn't quite ready for prime time. A 7200 RPM drive will offer better performance, but it's both hotter and eats batteries. I have a 7200RPM 160GB SATA-II drive and I still get about 3 hours of battery life, but your mileage may vary.

One thing that is often overlooked is video memory. I made sure I got a laptop with 256MB on board video RAM. Many have 128MB or they use shared memory. Having 256MB dedicated is crucial both for game and OS performance.

A friend has a Laptop Lock that covers the VGA port, and I haven't been able to bypass it using any of the methods I've found online { Link } . They offer a couple of models. For the one she has you put it over the VGA port and screw down two thumbscrews, then put the locking cap in place and secure it with a barrel-style key. You'd have to rip the VGA port out of the laptop to get the cable off and I haven't been able to pick the lock. I'll probably get one of those myself.

For personal stuff I still do use the T-43 I bought just before I joined HP. It's been a great workhorse, though it did have some power supply/motherboard/DC-in socket issues last year.

But I really like my new HP Compaq 8510w. I'm surprised, too, because I really didn't want a wide-screen, but it grows on you. Dual core, 2 GB (upgradable to 4 GB), 17" wide screen (fits comfortably in my Lotusphere pack, but 15" is available too), 100 GB drive (120 GB is availble, and it is 7200 rpm), NVidia, DVD-RW, 802.11g, Bluetooth, and battery life is better than 3hours.

Regarding the fingerprint scanner, the only thing it ever did for me is lock me out of my machine when I accidentally brushed against the scanner and clicked on the wrong choice in a dialog that popped up. It is now disabled.

Well, I think I will post this myself at some stage, but here is a dose of reality on the Mac.

I got one for the first time 8 months ago. There IS pain in moving to the Mac. UI takes getting used to, File structure definately takes getting used to.

But, after the pain its worth it... IMO. VMWare does what you need, and you will like using a computer again

...I am a little concerned about the differences in keyboard and mouse design. Paul's pain probably included a lot of trying to rethink which keys on the mac controlled right-click behavior and other Windows-specific input scenarios. I bought my wife an iBook (pre-Intel) 2 years ago and she has by and large hated it. Mostly this has been because her clients typically use Outlook which doesn't run on the Mac and because of the right-click weirdness, but she also had a tough time understanding the concept of "Quit". She frequently closed the main window for an application thinking the app was closed, but in reality it was still eating up memory doing nothing.

Speaking of keyboards, I LOVE the keyboard on my 3-yr-old Thinkpad T42 and would probably consider another Thinkpad before any other non-Mac upgrade. A more likely scenario is that I give that one to my wife and buy a MBPro w/ 4GB Ram, etc. for myself. The ability to run multiple VM instances for testing and demo purposes is a major factor in upgrade considerations.

Considering all the problems MS is having getting Vista to not suck, I don't think it makes any sense to invest in a PC unless perhaps you think you'll put Ubuntu on it eventually. Or maybe someone will perfect installing MacOS on a ThinkPad :-).

I guess one way to help decide is to put that new iMac through some trials with VMWare and whatnot to see how you like the setup.

Yep, do it, get a MacBook Pro 15". I've been using it for 8 months now running VISTA 90% of the time. I know it's blasphemy, but it works great (using Bootcamp)!!

Best of both worlds: great hardware, fully backwards compatible with your day to day work (designing).

Right before Lotusphere I bought a new hi-capacity battery for my 3-yr-old Thinkpad T42 (the one that bulges out the back slightly, and I never had a problem with power. I occasionally added juice to it while sitting in the Dolphin lobby but I never felt a need to sit in a session near an outlet. This is the same as I experienced on earlier trips but batteries wear out so a new one seemed in order. Good purchase for sure.

I also have the fingerprint scanner thing on this baby and except for an issue early on where I had forgotten my "actual" password and couldn't readily get in to correct some kind of driver problem, I have found it very convenient and reliable.

Lessons:

1 - Good battery management starts with processors that can run at lower wattage (I think mine actually slows down in battery mode if I choose a power profile geared for maximum runtime). I'm guessing some of the crappy battery-life reports are with machines using desktop processors.

2- Good to buy new batteries every couple years or so.

I would definitely try to run your Windows environment on your new iMac in VM/Bootcamp/whatever if you haven't already. That would be the decisive factor I would think, as worst case you can just do what Theo does and use Mac hardware but run Windows. You can ease into the rest of the "mac stuff" more slowly. I'm eager to hear what your experience might be if you do that.

Good luck. Oh, I have a program from Lotusphere I snagged for you now that we're neighbors.