

Developer laptop - unusximmortalis

hello awesome community,
any recommendations please on developing laptops, which will need to be robust&#x2F;resilient to some traveling (30% of time), battery lasts more than 4-5 hours, at least 16GB RAM, SSD, AND not heat itself up to the point where I can&#x27;t hold it on my lap, no matter if the CPU goes 100% for long times?
thanks,
Unus
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auganov
Ivy Bridge x230t here, it definitely gets too hot after a few minutes of 100%
cpu usage. Broadwell should produce less heat given the die shrink (compared
to Haswell and Ivy Bridge) ? I'm pretty ignorant on that topic tho.

EDIT - perhaps :
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X1-Carbon...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X1-Carbon-
Broadwell-CPU-Temp)

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wario_150cc
Never understimate the noise of a laptop, that can be really annoying in the
long run. We switch to Lenovo T series for the
customization/warranty/perfomance/silence combo and we're happy about it.

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loopbit
I guess it depends on which language/environment you develop for. I use a
Macbook Pro and it seems to cover all your requirements.

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unusximmortalis
you can run on a Macbook, linux and windows with parallels. so it covers them
all

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loopbit
Sure, but if you are developing for Windows or your toolset runs exclusively
on it a Lenovo laptop might give you better mileage than running
parallels/VirtualBox or BootCamp on a mac.

But apart from that, yep, I'm quite happy with my setup.

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sjs382
I don't understand... What makes a Lenovo laptop better than a Macbook Pro for
running Windows?

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unusximmortalis
I guess what he is saying is that lenovo running windows will consume the
battery slower than a MB running windows (either in parallels or directly
booted up)

btw, is there a comparative study anywhere about how long the battery will
last for a MB running windows (in parallels or botted) vs MB running latest
apple OS?

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loopbit
Didn't see this until today, but yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

I don't use boot camp very often, but when I do the battery gets drained
faster and the laptop gets hot to the point where you have to be careful not
to touch the space between some keys.

Parallels/VirtualBox/etc runs fine, but makes running anything with a GUI
extremely slow. In some cases it doesn't matter, but in others...

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unusximmortalis
thank you for your input

"Parallels/VirtualBox/etc runs fine" when you do that, is the battery of the
MB running down faster? or no big difference?

how much memory do you have on your MB? and how much do you allocate to the
Windows VM instance before you start it? did you try to allocate more memory
and see if the performance of those windows app with GUI, which you say is
very slow, getting any better?

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loopbit
Hey, this time I catched this early.

When running VirtualBox I see no big difference on battery drain, at least
nothing that can't be attributed to extra workload.

I think that the last version of Parallels I used was 6, so I can't really
talk about it, but again, my experience at the time was the same, the battery
lasted more or less the same.

A link that someone else posted blamed the crappy windows drivers by Apple and
it does make sense.

As for your other questions, I have 16GB of RAM, I've used windows 7 and 8 VMs
with 2, 4 and 8GB in this laptop.

Now, you have to take into account that I don't usually use windows VMs as
normal machines, I usually fire it up, do whatever I need to do and shut it
down. Once said that, giving it more ram helped to some extent, but not much.
For example, the difference from 2 to 4 was much more noticeable than from 4
to 8. I haven't tried with more memory and ended up leaving it at 4GB.

I kind of feel the need to point that I'm talking from memory with nothing
like hard evidence or tests, so don't take this as an fact or anything like it
:)

The most recent example I can think of was Inkscape. I suddenly needed to edit
a svg, couldn't install Inkscape on OSX (I had a problem with XQuartz, a
requirement) and the only suitable VM I had at hand was windows 7.

After firing it up and installing Inkscape there, I found that redrawing the
screen took 10-15 seconds, every time I moved the svg around. After trying to
work on it for a few minutes I found it so exasperating that I prefered to go
back, fix the issue with XQuartz and use Inkscape in OSX.

~~~
unusximmortalis
great info, much appreciated, thank you!

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bbissoon
Thinkpad X1 Carbon - I love this thing.
[http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...](http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-carbon/)

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muhpirat
I think the ThinkPad X250 should to the job.

-MuhPirat

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creshal
For the record, it officially only supports 8 GiB RAM, but it seems to work
fine with 16 GiB sticks.

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muhpirat
Ohhh, yeah. You are right. Sorry.

