This gets visited each year or so, and I can't find an update since 2008, but what do you recommend for a laptop 1) on a budget 2) no budget, dream machine/nerdgasm, etc?
Greetings,
My ex-employer equipped most of the forensics/ediscovery consulting staff with Dell M6500s. These were great, though heavy, laptops - eSATA port, lots of RAM, big drives, fast processors, big screen. I was very happy with it. But, you cannot be on a budget if you want one.
My personal laptop, which I use for everything from development to surfing to simple forensics, is an $1,800 maxed out Mac Air with VMware Fusion. It does well for many things but isn't really superb due to the 256GB limit on the SSD drive, 4GB limit on the RAM, and CPU.
My prior machine was a maxed out Mac Book Pro with Fusion and Bootcamp. That was a superb everything machine, though it lacked an integrated eSATA port. You pay more for the hardware than you would an equivalent Windows machine, but it is nicer hardware.
I'm inclined to buy myself another Dell M6500 if I end up with loads of spare cash….
-David
Been using the Alienware m15 in the filed but quite frankly it is getting to be to much to lug around. Really all I need is something that can do some fast I/O throughput - e-SATA, firewire, USB 3 - and some ability to do basic analysis. Really have not seen performance differences in dual and quad cores for RegRipper and NetAnalysis 😉
But I am still a geek and if I can get speed, I'll take it so I have been looking at the
If I can run a R/O T35es on the e-SATA port and then via the xpress card run a firewire, USB 3 or e-stata card for the capture drive (or just the dock to USB 3).
Then there is still enough juice to do EnCase or my processor intensive stuff on it as well if needed.