Ultrabooks

[cetoole]

As some may know, I recently have started a job that involves a good bit of travel, something like 2 weeks a month on average. I need a laptop, and think an ultrabook would really be the ticket. Does anyone have experience with any, not counting the mba? I have been looking mostly at the Gigabyte u2442n and asus nerdbook prime (err, zenbook). Any others people have had good experience with?

[morphsci]

Not really an ultra book, but pretty small. I needed something to run Excel 2010 and SAS so I got the cheapest Acer Aspire One 722 I could find. Ripped out the HD and memory stick and dropped in a Crucial SSD and an 8Gb memory stick. It runs Win 7 64 bit like a champ and I have had nary a glitch in about 6 months now. Slightly thicker and heavier than my MBA but not any wider or deeper and a whole hell of a lot cheaper.

[grawk]

I bet the MBA is a great windows box

[Dusty Chalk]

I'd be curious what swapping in a SSD into a regular laptop would do for battery life. Are there any other differences between Ultrabooks and Laptops?

I have no advice, but I am interested in your results.

[morphsci]

I bet the MBA is a great windows box

Actually, I tried it with parallels and did not like the results at all. Parallels works great on my Mac Pro at work.

[grawk]

I've heard good things about it in boot camp tho

[morphsci]

Yeah, and to be fair, my MBA is from the last non-thunderbolt generation.

[Absorbine_Sr]

I run Windows 7 via Boot Camp on my 13" MBA and it is an excellent Windows box. I did try VMWare first, and as Jim implies, it was less than stellar. But give it direct access to the hardware and Windows 7 runs better than I've seen it on work laptops.

[HeadphoneAddict]

I agree that BootCamp is better running Windows than Parallels 7, but Quicken isn't very demanding and I prefer to have Max OS available without shutting down Windows. I still wish I could trade my unopened package of Vista Business for Windows 7. At the moment I'm still using Win XP on my Mac just to run Quicken, because I'm just too cheap to invest in Win 7 and I read so many complaints about Vista when it came out.

[grawk]

I think everyone that bought vista is right there with you, Larry.

[tyrion]

I have use both Boot Camp and parallels and there's no question of parallels is better way to go. I use parallels in my office on probably 10 different computers every day running Windows programs without any issues. I had Boot Camp on my PowerBook andit was always a problem.

[morphsci]

I think everyone that bought vista is right there with you, Larry.

Actually I am still running an old slow laptop for a few legacy programs at home. It came with Vista, never had a problem with Vista, still running Vista. Probably the most stable Win machine I ever owned. I realize this experience is way out in the tail, but there you have it.

Oh and I agree with Larry. Boot camp for me is not a real option on the MBA. I use it so much and I hate rebooting it since the sleep mode works so well. Parallels caused lots of beach balls and freezes on the MBA, so it was just too annoying.

Edited October 5, 2012 by morphsci

[Dreadhead]

I also never had any problems with my two vista machines (I upgraded to W7 because I wanted to try it out), I don't think your experience is actually that far from the norm. Every home user type person that I've ever talked to that bashed vista big time was not running it. There were some issues that gamers hated though, that was a valid gripe thought you could fix all of them with some configuration setting. I think from the enterprise side though there were some real issues but I don't know about that.

[morphsci]

Yeah, all the IT guys I know hated and continue to hate Vista with a religious fervor.

[dsavitsk]

If you are traveling a lot, I'd take a look at a Thinkpad. I bet there is some way around here to eek out a discount on one, too ...