Following on from Jamies workstation section I was wondering if there are laptops favoured by the forensic community?
Ideally something that can run EnCase comfortably and has firewire 800 built in. We currently use the IBM T60 (no firewire 800) and we are going to upgrade shortly.
We looked at
Ronan
To the best of my knowledge, the only laptops with Fireware 800 built in is a MAC. You can get cards w/ 800 for the non-MACs. Using a MAC and parallels sound cool, and at least one examiner who uses it likes the combination. Might be a thought if your organisation can afford MACs.
MAC and parallels sound cool
Hi ddow,
Yeah we looked at the intel based MACs to allow us to load on XP and run encase - we're favouring this option but would like to find out how current investigators have found this setup - would you friend have any comments?
Just one more - When you say MAC and parallels can you clarify what you mean by this?
Cheers
Paralles is an add on utility that allows one to run XP on the MAC quite transparently. This gives you the ability to use any of the Windows based forensic programs on (IMHO) superior platform. Of course, I'm a Linux guy, so what do I know. )
I started using my Mac Book with Parallels as a forensic machine when I was out on a case taking notes (on the Mac) and needed another machine to look at drives while the main machine was imaging. There were some issues with USB and Parallels, but 3.0 resolved most of those.
UTK/FTK and X-Ways so far seem to run just fine.
Greetings,
I run a MacBook Pro with VMware and run FTK in an XP Pro virtual machine just fine. Makes rebuilding a fresh analysis machine a snap. I've a "stock" forensics XP image that I can roll out and customize for each case.
-David
MacBook Pro is what I would suggest, you can install various operating systems on it and it runs Windows better than a PC does )
Several Asus notebooks now have onboard FW800. It really doesn't matter anymore though, with expresscard adapters having even better throughput than the onboard. I like a portable desktop though, I'll put some pictures up when my latest one is finished.
Cheers gmarshall139,
I'd defo be interested to see your pics. I'm going to look at the Mac Pro and the Asus to compare them and find the strengths and weaknesses of both. I keep reading that the Mac Pro is the fastest machine to run Win XP.
This is fine as I want to run both FTK and EnCase on it.
Must look into this expresscard you talk about.
Thanks for the advice,
Ronan
Ronan,
The expresscard slot is an improvement on the cardbus and pcmcia standard and is common on most new laptops. I haven't tested it yet, but I understand that removes the bottleneck that previously existed with the other cards.