It's about time for me to upgrade my laptop and am soliciting any
recommendations/advice you, my faithful blog reading audience of six, care to share. I use the laptop for User Group talks, conferences, and as the
presentation/demo machine for my classes and training. In total, it gets used maybe
once or twice a week for a total average of maybe four hours/week. That's the
only time the laptop is on. I do all my "real" work/development on a
desktop.
Currently I have an older Dell I bought four years ago with 512 MB of RAM. It can crawl at times with a couple Visual Studio 2005 instances running, SQL Server Management Studio up, a couple browsers going, and so on.
I'd like to strike a nice balance between performance and portability, but there's no need to pay a premium for an "ultra-light." Moreover, since I only upgrade my laptop once every four or five years, I'd like something that's still capable (albeit slower, for sure) of handling Visual Studio 2010.
It's been so long since I've been in the market for a laptop and I've yet to start researching prices/specs, but thought I'd put out a request for comments and feedback. My budget is in the $1,500-$2,000 range.
Any comments, advice, or suggestions are most welcome.