RE: Laptop Considerations

From: Kris Wingard (kwingard_at_synergisticusa.com)
Date: 12/13/04

  • Next message: Faisal Khan: "Re: Port Scanning." 
    Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 10:20:29 -0500
To: <pen-test@securityfocus.com>

    I highly recommend the Latitude D600. I work for a consulting company,
    and all of our engineers use that model. You're right about the ports,
    it is so crucial to have parallel/serial/USB in this line of work, and
    the latitude comes standard with all of them. The built-in wireless
    works great. As you probably know, Dell has great warranty support
    if/when you ever need it. I'd say go for it man, you know they'll have
    great driver support for years to come, so you'll also be able to
    rebuild with any OS and not have to worry about finding a driver out on
    the wild web to support your hardware.

    -----Original Message-----
    From: David Bouchard [mailto:lists@tigercomputersolutions.com]
    Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 10:47 PM
    To: pen-test@securityfocus.com
    Subject: Laptop Considerations

    I am about to be purchasing a laptop and I was wanting the advice of the
    list. I know this can be a very personal topic for some people, but I
    have
    to throw it out there anyway.

    Here's my situation...I'm about to be attending a degree program in
    Information Assurance and Forensics. I also have my own business doing
    a
    variety of things computer related. At some point I would like to delve
    more heavily into vulnerability assesment, penetration testing, and
    possibly
    forensics. I'm looking for a laptop that will be flexible enough to
    meet
    all these needs.

    This is what my immediate plans for the laptop are: for my business, I
    need
    to have some of the basic MS Office suite on it, as well as MS
    Publisher. I
    plan on making it into a dual-boot machine with some flavor of linux. I
    don't care to use a live linux CD because I want to be able to store
    logs,
    settings, and other data onto the drive, and I hope to eventually use
    linux
    for everything except the MS stuff that I have to use on occasion for my
    business.

    Because of the variety of things I plan on doing, I want to get one that
    has
    a serial and a parallel port in addition to the USB that they pretty
    much
    all come with now. It would be nice to have at least one PCMCIA slot as
    well. I plan to do some wireless network assessment, so it needs to be
    wireless capable, but for my purposes being able to attach an external
    antennae for extra range isn't that important.

    What I'm looking at right now is the Dell Latitude D600. I've supported
    and
    purchased a lot of Dell desktop computers and have been very happy with
    them
    and I have run Knoppix-STD on a Dell laptop and everything ran well.
    The
    D600 has the ports I'd like.

    Any thoughts or recommendations? Any capibilities that you think I've
    missed?

    Thanks,
    David

  • Next message: Faisal Khan: "Re: Port Scanning."