For a geek, nothing brings back that feeling that we had when we were 7 years old running out of our rooms on Christmas day to see what Santa brought much like getting a new PC or laptop. Recently I purchased a Latitude D830 from Dell. The laptop is normal enough but the main difference is the hard drive. I splurged this time and purchased the solid state drive (SSD) upgrade, which caps out now at 64 GB. For those new to SDD, it's essentially a hard drive technology with no moving parts and resembles a flash drive that you use in your camera. Because it has no moving parts, it's strangely quiet and the battery lasts an amazing 6-8 hours.

Most importantly, it's fast. Boot times are about 4-8 seconds once you see the Windows logo. Applications like Outlook and Excel open in about 1.5 seconds. For a DBA, queries that used to take 30 seconds on my old laptop, now take 5 seconds. According to manufactors, you should see about 150% boost on write performance. I'm seeing this easily so far.

With every pro there is a con. With SDD technology, it's new and expensive. The upgrade retailed at $800, although it was heavily discounted. The most you can order presently is 64 GB, which for a developer with virtual pc's may be tough. This technology is getting cheaper fast though and larger drives are coming. Samsung just announced a 300 GB drive to be released (at about a $2,000 price tag recently). The drive size is my biggest gripe so far but it's easily upgradable later.

 I've been so spoiled by the new drive technology that I'll find it hard to buy anything else than a laptop with SDD.

 Brian Knight