Oi, Pete, you leave Trigger out of this, you are only jealous

ColGod, I am leaning towards the Dell option, but am struggling to hit the button, it's a lot of cash and a lease ties you into 3 years, and after 2 MS will have moved the goalposts for training again

Oi, Pete, you leave Trigger out of this, you are only jealous

ColGod, I am leaning towards the Dell option, but am struggling to hit the button, it's a lot of cash and a lease ties you into 3 years, and after 2 MS will have moved the goalposts for training again

have you checked DMXdimension?.. for 800 quid id say thats a billy-bargain (the standard studio 15, not the XPS)

IIRC you can get dell laptops with the core i7 these days.. no mention of them being any more cut-down then their desktop bretheren.

Something like a Dell Studio XPS 16 should do the trick... they do come with VT+ and can be specced with 8 gig.

Although I'd note that dell appear to have very variable build quality depending on the model range.

I currently have a Dell M6400 Precision which I use for software development work - very, very satisfied with it. It's large and very heavy, but it's used pretty much as a desktop replacement that I can cart about when needed, so not really a problem for me there.

64-bit CPU, will take up to 16GB (I have it at 8 right now), and can take 2 hard disks. I run VMWare Workstation on it, and it's perfect. Case is a solid metal shell, build quality is excellent. The newer M6500 models come with Core i7's that have all the latest virtualisation features so you should have no problems - and there's a range of 15" and 17" screens.

Downside - expensive, obviously. But at least with the one I've got, I feel as though I've got my money's worth.

Just thought I would wrap this one up. I got a good deal from Dell on an Alienware in the end. I absolutely HATE the LED's etc but the Alienware software let's you turn them off. I had some Dell credit after a **** up on a server order so after several conversations with mombai finally got them to sell me a, as a business, a consumer machine.

Specs wise I got

Alienware M15X

8GB DDR3 RAM

2 x 500GB Drive

Core i7 Quad

ATI 5850 1GB - DDR5

Slot in DVD-R/W with BluRay playback

WLED 1920 x 1080 screen

It's dual booting between Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, W2k8 is running Hyper-V and I have 2 DC's and 3 Exchange 2010 Servers on it along with an SCCM VM for Demo / Teaching purposes and even with the Exchange environment running it's still pretty rapid, and impresses people with the presentations I have done with it so far. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit is stable as a stable thing, it's also running VirtualBox with Ubuntu, Linux Tiny Core and Windows XP VM's and in MW2 I am getting better frame rates than my Desktop PC.

All in all I am really happy with it, it came out higher specced and cheaper than a new MBP, has a Red Magnesium Chassis so not to shabby. The only criticism is I am missing the MacBook trackpad, that was a really useful device with pinch and zoom etc, and I am missing the iLife suite, principally iPhoto for sorting out pictures and doing a bit of quick editing.

Looks like I am going to have to have a play with Lightroom on Windows to see if I can get some of that functionality back.