Desktop Replacements and the 11 Pound Pencil

Marco Ramius writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has an article up entitled 'Unwieldy Laptops or Portable Desktops?' in which the author lugs an Alienware Area-51m desktop replacement to a 32 hour LAN to assess what advantages and disadvantages desktop replacements have over desktops themselves." They also have a related article entitled The Case of the 11 Pound Pencil where an office adopts a desktop replacement solution to unsatisfactory ends. Both interesting looks at appropriate uses for hefty hardware.

Comments

Alienware Area-51m

[IflyRC]

This my friends is the source of global warming. A machine that puts out so much heat that you can feel like stripping down as soon as its powered up can melt the polar ice caps. These should be banned in Antarctica and Canada.

Bloody Hell

[ajs318]

These people should not be allowed to have computers. Plain and simple.

Where I work, we have been using close to 100% LAMP since before that name was even invented. Everything is done using custom, in-house-written Perl {or, nowadays, sometimes PHP} scripts on a central server, and shoved into an SQL database. I don't believe we've spent a single penny on software licencing since before we moved premises, and that was a year ago.

Once you've written a couple of LAMP applications, it's easy enough just to copy the important functions out of a past one, spend an afternoon tinkering with it and have a new one up and running. The most important thing is to get procedures in place for doing something by hand first, before you even think about computerising it.

But, I know we're exceptional. Some of the firms we have to deal with, employ people basically to copy and paste stuff from an e-mail or Word document into an Excel spreadsheet. They think they're doing something clever, even going so far as to describe their operations as sophisticated and computerised. Go figure .....