I recently picked a Dell Precision M50 laptop. It’s a nice machine, P4M 2.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB 5400RPM drive and Nvidia 64MB Quadro 500 GoGL card driving a 1600×1200 display. It’s quite a contrast with my Sony Z505 Vaio, but I’ve been thinking of a paradigm shift in laptops anyways. I now carry my Treo which allows me to SMS, IM, Email all on the go without having to open up my ultra-portable laptop. Since the Treo means I only need my laptop for real computing (Hotel room, customer site demo, presentation or technical work) why not have a desktop replacement with plenty of guts?

I have built it up with a 2915 802.11a/b/g Mini-PCI card for wireless to complement the internal Ethernet and have added an extra battery to replace the floppy (floppy is dead, really). I ended up loading the machine with the required Windows XP + SP2 + Office 2k3 (our standard load) and then put on Red Hat Fedora Core 5. I hadn’t run FC in years and thought it was about time to come around and see where it stood. I’ve been very impressed and think that I’ll be leaving this as a FC machine for the duration.

More info to come as I carry it more.