Intel standard issue laptops are pretty good machines, if you’re not a graphics software developer. Generally we’re issued a ThinkPad or Pavilion of some flavor. When I re-joined the company in 2007, however, I learned about a pilot program IT was running called Macs@Intel. Long story short, I got into the program and ended up with a Macbook Pro (A1211). This is a fairly good machine, even by today’s standards. It’s got a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 120GB HDD and an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 graphics processor.
The standard IT build for the Apple machine is Leopard with Parallels running Windows XP, which is necessary because such a huge part of the company’s infrastructure is so heavily dependent on the Microsoft platform. This worked pretty well for me for a while, but I wanted more out of this capable hardware.
So, I bought a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD for the machine and set up a triple-boot configuration with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows 7 (beta) 64-bit, and Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64. It was a little more tricky to set up than I originally thought it would be, but after (generally) following this very helpful blog entry over on GeekLimit, I was up and running.
I’m really enjoying this set up so far. Win7 is great for doing the driver development work I need to do, and Ubuntu worked so well out of the box (even better than Win7, honestly) that it more than fits the bill for another project I’m working on. Finally, Mac OS X provides the perfect platform for some future work I’m setting up to do - plus it is fun to tinker around with the iPhone SDK.
The only downside is that without WinXP, I have to be careful not to connect to the corporate network - if I do, I’ll get port-scanned, blocked and my department will get charged a fee for having a non-standard machine on the network! Se la vi.