The machines have withstood some serious abuse by our employees and held up well. In addition, it’s very easy to find a local HP-certified repair center to get stuff fixed for any issues we’ve had.

Running a virtual on a usb portable SATA hard drive is pretty slick and you always have your machine with you no matter where you go. PLUS a back up of your complete virtual is just a copy job away.

Dell XPS1730 has dual internal SATA options for Raid 1 but they are $$$

Going cheap look into HP ( they have a duo core, 4 GB RAM, 12 cell li-po for $799.99 at best buy ).

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-pavilion-dv6985se/4505-3121_7-33088545.html?tag=mncol;lst

Going for Broke look into a Lenovo X300 ( if you use your discover card i think you get 5% cashback PLUS if you cash in your discover rewards for a Lenovo gift card they double your reward )

Buy a Macbook, Fujitsu Lifebook, or Thinkpad.

There was one time when we deployed over 100 Acer PCs for our clients and 50 of them crashed due to HDD failure so I guess it happens. What made it worse in your case is the lousy support.

Where support is concerned, I have contacted Dell twice before and my colleague has as well. It’s quite good over here and very responsive. Most recently, I encountered a warning that my battery was about to fail (with 1 more month to the end of warranty). Called up Dell and the replacement was delivered the following day… no questions asked. Prior to that was an issue with my keyboard and as well, they were here within 24 hours and the technician assisting me on the phone was also professional, friendly & helpful.

Yes you pay a premium on your laptop but it really comes in handy. There is a lot of thought that has gone into the design of Sony laptops and they have the best customer service I’ve ever dealt with.

My machine supposedly has a heating problem (I have not noticed it yet) and they offer an in-house fix plus an extension to my warranty for another 2 years. That’s what I call caring for the customer. Having used compaq, dell, hp and IBM I would say IBM is the only that came close to Sony, not too sure about the new Lenovo customer service though..

Personally, I have very good experiences with HP. Especially if you can find a decent model at Best Buy and purchase the warranty. Then anytime anything goes wrong they will give you a new one off the shelf immediately.

Mac laptops are actually quite competitive with similarly equipped tier-1 laptops. The ‘Apple tax’ really isn’t an issue any more. To add to it, Apples hold their value much better than non-Apple laptops. In three years, you can sell your used MacBook Pro for much more than the you could another laptop, and you’ll make back much more than the initial difference in price.

The issue with comparing Apple laptops with non-Apple is that most other manufacturers provide a much larger array of features. You are more likely to find a laptop with exactly what you need. You may not want a built in video camera, or built in 802.11a/n networking alongside 802.11b/g/n. Or you may want a two hard drive laptop with built in RAID.

With Apple, you have 3 laptops options. You have 2 or 3 CPU options for each, can choose the amount of memory pre-installed, the hard drive size, and matte or glossy LCD. That is basically it.

VMs will always suffer from performance degradation, plus you’ll have to give them a wodge of memory for their dedicated use. You’ll also have to have a licence for Windows for each host install.

I’m still using a 5 year old Sony Vaio at home. It’s been a great machine, but is probably showing its age now. I won’t buy a new Vaio because the latest keyboards are awful (like the non-Pro MacBooks). I recommend trying a few in the shop to gauge their feel.

Hard drives fail regularly. Sign up to Mozy and back up all your source to the cloud for free (well 2GB of it anyway). Microsoft’s Live Mesh will give you another 5GB of synced up repository. As for your regular apps, I have a DVD-RW that I keep up to date, but you could invest in a USB key and keep them on there – a lot of apps even run from USB flash devices now.

Anyway, sorry to hear about your bad luck. I think that support is very important and it’s disappointing to hear that Dell have seriously let you down in this regard.

My personal recommendation to most devs is to stick with Lenovo. Yes its utilitarian and the least sexy piece of hardware, but its reliable, fast, and comes with the least amount of pre-installed crap one could ask for. The obligatory reformat when you first get it is unnecessary!

BTW – don’t believe all the crap you get thrown about performance suffering as a result of working in a VM. Contrary to what a lot of folks say, your performance in a VM will be great.

I’ve been working on OSX as well as in several Windows VMs (doing Visual Studio development) for a couple of years now and I don’t plan on ever going back to a Windows only device anytime soon.