Mid-High End Development Laptop

JuncoPartner

Hi maybe someone out there can give me some advice on this...

I'm looking to buy a new laptop to use for work.
At the moment I'm using a 2year old Dell Inspiron 5150 with a pentium 4 chip and 2GB RAM. However at this stage its just not cutting the mustard anymore...

I need something that can handle me running visual studio 6, 2003, 2005 pretty much all day long. It also needs to be able to handle me running a sql server 2000 and a sql server 2005 db locally as well ass running Management Studio to umpteen external DBs. On top of that Ill have all the usual crap running, firefox and few ie browsers outlook.

I need a machine that can make all that happen nice and quick nice and easy and without burning my hands off every time I touch it!!

So the from looking around I'm thinking the Dell Precision M90 Essential is looking good.
I want to bump the processor up to the Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2600 (2.16Ghz)
Hard Drive 80GB, tho thats not really important.
It has gigabit ethernet, built in wifi built in blutooth.
But the real selling point for me is they can give me up to 4GB RAM (533MHz DDR2 SDRAM)

So all in all this looks like a damn hot machine.
My only issue is they want an extra €2600 for the RAM!!!
The jump from 1GB to 2GB is a mere €270 which is fine by me
So how the hell do they work out € 2,670 for the bump to 4GB

So after ALL that!! Does anyone know of someone selling a similarly spec'd machine for a more reasonable price!?
If not I'll bite the bullet and go with this Dell, its pretty much a necessity for me, but I just dont like the way I am being raped for the RAM....

Thanks

Lord Oz

To get 4gb or ram you need two 2gb sticks, however 2gb sticks of laptop ram cost a fortune. You're not going to find the ram much cheaper elsewhere. The M90 is a good laptop. You might not need a graphics card that powerful, unless you'll be doing OpenGL rendering.

jimmycrackcorm

Get a 17 inch widescreen anyway for all those project windows and so on. Otherwise I debated the same myself especially for VS2005. I went for an athlon64 inanticipation of a more powerful windows 64 in due course. Had SQL 2005 been a priority for me then I would definitely have gone for dual core.

I think 2gb is ok for running SQL and VS together. I run both on a 2gb desktop Pentium D and the memory is still ok.

for the price of the extra ram you'd nearly be better buying another laptop just to run SQL 2005 as a server...

JuncoPartner

Great guys thanks for the responses. As for graphics card, yeah I only need the bog standard I guess, I dont do much visual work and all my gaming is reserved for my 360!
As for the 17 inch screen, Ive never had one but at the moment depending on what office Im in I run on two screens and oh what a difference it makes. But the times when I dont have access to a second screen are awful so I'm thinking 17inch should soften the blow!
I was looking on www.alienware.co.uk and they have some nice machines too, no 4GB RAM tho, but they are now offering AMD dual cores. I've never used a machine with an AMD but I've heard great things.
I think Ill try squeeze a few more months out of my current machine tho until other manufacturers start offering 4GB ram and the prices drop a bit. I'm fairly put off just getting a machine with only a max of 2GB.
maybe I will just go with the dell now...or maybe ill wait... I just cant decide!