I confess I was a bit frugal even before we moved to Maine seven years ago, but I’d like to think of myself as “value conscious” and not “price sensitive.” So when it came time to think about replacing my trusty, but four year old, IBM R52 laptop (which boots Linux and which also runs a Windows 7 virtual machine if you must know), I naturally gravitated toward the new core i5 15″ MacBook Pro with the hi-res anti-glare screen. Kitted out to last four-to-five years with few compromises, the price came in at more than $3,000. At $3K though, how can anyone not be “price sensitive”?! Time to re-evaluate…

The problem was that a few of the more popular keys on my laptop’s keyboard were becoming unpredictable, and the hard drive was getting noisier, meaning a hard drive failure in the near future was more likely than not — especially as I have been using this machine hard pretty much every working day (all seven every week…) for the past four-plus years.

After a bit of research, I decided instead of buying a new laptop to try an experiment: I got a new replacement keyboard for $60 and a new all-digital (no moving parts!) fast SSD hard disk for $240. After about 45 minutes of careful screwdriver work and a 2-hour wait for the hard disk cloning to complete, I found I had a “new” laptop about as fast as a MacBook Pro (prior to their update this week). Boot times are down from 1:20 to about 20 seconds and everything loads in about 1/4 of the time it used to.

Essentially, for $300 I can now get another year or two out of my trusty IBM R52 laptop. If circumstances dictate I need a truly new laptop some months down the road, I can choose the most optimal model at that time. How “value conscious” is that, eh?

But that’s for me. The overwhelming majority of my work is disk- and network-intensive, not processor intensive, so running a 1.6GHz Centrino processor is not a bottleneck for me. “Old ‘n Busted” is plenty good enough…

One of my partners, Chris Falk, spends a lot of time prototyping new client deployments using virtualization on his laptop. Where I will have only one virtual machine, perhaps two, running at any one time, Chris can often have four or more. Chris’s four-year-old MacBook Pro was keeping up with the workload, but wheezing, and impeding Chris’s productivity.

So yesterday, Chris bought a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro, and by being smart about the feature set, kept the price under $3K. “New Hotness” was the right choice for Chris.

If you are trying to get a handle on life cycling your company’s workstations, laptops and servers, please give us a call at (207) 772-5678. Remember, we are intentionally not a reseller for any hardware or software, so whether or not you buy new hardware doesn’t impact our bottom line one iota.

Hope that helps!

All the best,
Mark, CIO

Reliable Networks is pleased to host the April meeting of the New England ISO group, a collaborative group of Information Security Officers and Chief Security Officers from New England enterprises.

During the meeting, I will be sharing our best practices regarding email server security. The talk will be less bits ‘n bytes technical (no procmail rulesets for example!) than it will be strategic; intended to provide ISOs with both a framework and a template for securing email systems.

Malware infestations typically penetrate enterprises through web browsing and email payloads. While there is no substitute for good end-user security training, there are some things which can be done on the email server-side of things to mitigate risk, at reasonable cost, and without inconveniencing end users unduly.

NEISO meeting attendance by non-members is by invitation, so if you would like to come, please follow the link on the NEISO website.

Hope to see you there!

All the best,
Mark
CIO