Work Laptop

We were issued Lenovo W510's at work - a very powerful machine and it's quite nice. I installed Linux Mint 11 GNOME on mine and it runs very smoothly. But the development environment at work is still Visual Studio on Windows XP. I explored many options for melding the Win/Linux environment on my dual monitor setup: Synergy, NX, xrandr.

Turns out that XP can do all of the things I like about Linux. The two applications keeping me in Mint (Pidgin, Evolution) actually have great Windows equivalents (Pidgin for Windows, Outlook 2007). With the addition of allSnap, Launchy, notepad++, and AutoHotkey, the Windows environment is quite usable. So my dev machine is 100% Windows and I can use my home desktop or work laptop as an RDP client. This essentially makes the client platform independent. And all email, code, etc. is automatically backed up on the dev machine, so all my important data is centralized there.

This is the first time in years (probably since GE) that I have had machine that is exclusively Windows. But I have been pleasantly surprised that XP makes a good enterprise/development desktop.