What kind of hardware to I use? Is that your question? Well, I basically do most of my stuff on two laptops that I bought myself: An HP Omnibook 500 and a Toshiba Libretto L2. Both computers are beefy enought to run Visual Studio 7 on Windows XP without too much pain. This is the primary requirement I have for any computer I buy. After that what I look for in a laptop is small and light.
My first try was the Omnibook 500. This ends up being my primary development machine (I love that we live in an era where a laptop can be my primary development machine). The only thing I didn't like initially was the little pencil eraser pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, but I've made my peace with that. BTW, It looks like HP has now renamed their entire laptop line "Pavilion." If I bought my Omnibook 500 today it would be a Pavilion ZU1000...
What I really like about this laptop (in addition it weighing only a little over 3 pounds) is the keyboard. I actually prefer it to my desktop machine. So I guess I'm a satisfied HP customer.
Last December we took a trip to Thailand. I knew there would be the ability to get on the internet so on a whim I purchased a Toshiba Libretto L2 the week before I left. This thing weighs in at about 2 pounds. It's got a 600MHz Crusoe chip in it, 256M of RAM and a 30 Gig hard drive and yet it's so small that everyone who sees it assumes it's a Windows CE device.
You can't buy this model in the US, but there's this company, dynamism.com, that buys cool computers that you can only buy in Japan and outfits them for the US. They did a great job getting the computer to me before I left on our Thailand trip. I actually used it to get on the internet while I was in Thailand (It has both a built in Ethernet connector and a built in 56K modem. At home, I always hook up with the Ethernet connector but in Thailand I could only get on the internet using a phone line).
The screen is pretty funky. The resolution is 1280 x 600 and it looks really crisp. Another cool thing is that if you install WinXP on it, the video driver lets you configure an external monitor and the laptop screen as separate monitors in dual monitor mode. Very cool!
The L2 comes with me to all meetings at work. We have wireless LAN support at work, so I'm always on the net no matter where I go.
9:57:43 PM 
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