For the past couple of weeks, I've been looking for the "right" laptop to use for home/work/dev/play.  I started to look at the Dell XPS M1330, their new slim 13.3" laptops, and was not too satisfied with their hardware/price ratio ... good hardware but too high of a price.  So then I started looking at refurbished Dells and quickly came to the same conclusion.  I was looking for the following things on a laptop:

  • Fast CPU - I want to do software virtualization (aka, VPCs).
  • Lots of RAM - (same reasons as above)
  • Descent size HD - (same reasons as above)

 comically suggested, you should check out the s (MBPs).  At first, I dimissed the comment...why would I buy a MacBook?  I'm a Windows guy...and that's when I started questioning reality... just kidding, not really.

I first started looking at the since it can run both Tiger (OSX) and Vista with the aid of .  Unfortantelly, a new MBP is too rich for my blood...so my I started looking at refurbished MBPs.  That's when I ran into this one .  After a quick glance on it, I knew that this was the machine I was looking for since it met my needs/requirements and was within my budget....the only problem was, could I switch to OSX after working with Windows for soo long?  Also, how can I do .NET development without having any MS tooling that works on a OSX?  I started to get disappointed...until I met, .  Check out the image below:

Currently here's what's running along side OSX:

  • Vista x86 - I had trouble using Boot Camp's drivers with Vista x64.
  • Office 2007
  • VS2008 - On my OSX Dock
  • .NET Framework 3.5
  • FeedDemon - On my OSX Dock
  • Zune Software

Best part yet?  If I want avoid the virtualization overhead (there isn't any noticeable kind) I can boot natively into Vista and be up in no time (1 min boot time).