Csla developers' recommendations for computer

[Chicagoan2016]

My personal laptop is dying and you know, we mainly use Visual studio and SQL Server.
What do you folks recommend? I could get a desktop but I like the mobility of a laptop. I have always bought gaming laptops in the past although I don't recall playing any computer games : ).
I would like to keep the price around $2,000.

Kind Regards

[StefanOssendorf]

My minimum specs for a laptop are:
32GB+ RAM
2TB+ SSD/m2
At least 6 performance cores in case of Intel. Don't know how amd is in that regard.
Anything else I don't care. Fingerprint/Windows Hello is nice but not must have.

[rockfordlhotka]

I understand the desire to use a gaming rig for development, as they are powerful! I see a small number of people at conferences lugging those around.

it is the "lugging around" part that turns me off - I don't want all that weight when travelling.

At home I have a custom-built PC that is easily upgraded component-by-component, and is always a very powerful machine for a fraction the cost of a laptop. My friend, Rick, loves to build PCs, and he builds/upgrades mine when appropriate. He has fun, I have a high end workstation, we get to hang out and eat pizza, everyone wins!

For travel I have been a Surface loyalist for many years. It isn't necessarily the best value out there, but they've been consistently good and light.

For a very long time I used Surface Pro models, and still kind of miss that form factor. Over the past three years I've had a Surface Studio Laptop (v1), and like it a lot, though it is heavier than a Pro - but it does have slightly more power. Next time I'll have a hard decision: to stick with the Studio Laptop or go back to the Pro.

Either way, I spend the money to get all the RAM I can (32gb is minimum these days imo), and a 1tb SSD.

I personally like having a touch screen. My gaming laptop (which is now very old) has a smudged screen b/c I keep touching it even though it doesn't support touch :)

My gaming rig is laughable at this point. The battery connection broke, so it is really a desktop in laptop form, and it is so many years old it doesn't run modern games - and it can't run Win11 - so pretty soon it'll become a Linux node in my k8s cluster. But one with a GPU that can do AI (slowly).

[Chicagoan2016]

@rockfordlhotka I haven't custom built a PC in a long time. This sounds fun.
Any recommendations for stores?
I remember back in the day as a college student we would look for Intel chipset motherboards. I wonder if that's still a thing.

[rockfordlhotka]

Rick has me buy parts from Microcenter, NewEgg, and Amazon - all depends on which is cheaper for the most part. We have a physical Microcenter close to where I live, so any last-minute bits and pieces generally come from there.

[ajohnstone-ks]

I haven't developed on it in a while, but when I did I found the Surface Book pretty good.